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Mionmcernin g 


PARENTS 








A SYMPOSIUM 
ON PRESENT DAY 
PARENTHOOD 





NEW YORK 
NEW REPUBLIC, INC. 
1926 





CopyRIGHT, 1926, 
By NEW REPUBLIC, Inc, 


First Edition, March, 1926. 
Reprinted, April, 1926. 
Reprinted, May, 1926. 
Reprinted, November, 1926. 


Printed in U. S. A. 


INTRODUCTION 


To-pay enlightened parents everywhere are com- 
ing to realize that, however important may be the 
contribution of the schools, the atmosphere and con- 
ditions of the home are, especially in the early years 
of the child’s life, the primary determinants in the 
development of the child; and that, since it is they 
who determine these conditions and create that at- 
mosphere, it is they who are of necessity the most 
important educational factors in the lives of’ their 
children. 

Fathers and mothers are beginning to realize that 
parenthood is a vocation and that its responsibilities 
can be met adequately only by these who bring to it 
an educational equipment sufficient for the task. 
They are appreciating that, in the light of the new 
understanding of the nature of the child and in the 
face of the constantly increasing complexity of mod- 
ern civilization, many of the old-time educational 
and disciplinary methods are as obsolete and out- 
worn as much of the industrial machinery and some 
of the scientific thought of former generations. 
Hence parents are feeling and expressing the need 
of more definite knowledge and of more conscious 
purpose in bringing up their children, They have 
become aware also that this knowledge is to be de- 
rived from the researches of modern science, pri- 

v 


vi INTRODUCTION 


marily in the fields of child psychology, pedagogy, 
and physical and mental hygiene, and they are seek- 
ing for adequate interpretation of the results of 
those researches with a view to practical application 
to the upbringing of their children. 

This attitude is of comparatively recent develop- 
ment. Thirty-five years ago a small group of women 
called together by Dr. Felix Adler, founded what is 
now the Child Study Association of America. They 
met to seek from scientific sources the knowledge 
they needed to guide them in the education of their 
children, the concept that brought them together was 
regarded as well-nigh revolutionary. It seemed pre- 
sumptuous to suggest that the natural parental in- 
stinct fortified by a few well-worn maxims and old 
wives’ tales was an insufficient guide for bringing 
up children. But the group persisted, and gradually 
the idea of parenthood as a vocation began to spread 
and take root. Groups were formed not only in 
New York City, but in other cities of the United 
States and in other lands. Thus the Child Study As- 
sociation has been working for over thirty-five years 
with parents and teachers, helping them in the gath- 
ering of study materials and the training of leaders. 

Last year the Association concluded that the move- 
ment had acquired sufficient momentum to justify a 
nation-wide Conference on Modern Parenthood to 
be held in the fall of 1925. It was felt that the 
free presentation by eminent scientists and educators 
of well-considered views and interpretations, and an 


INTRODUCTION Vil 


equally free discussion would help materially to 
clarify some of the more perplexing problems of 
child guidance and bring out some of the resources 
for the further education of parents. 

The Conference was held in October, 1925. Both 
in the extent and the intensity of the interest it 
aroused and in the constructive contributions it 
evoked, the Conference achieved a success beyond 
the expectation of those who planned it, and it was 
felt that in the interest of all those who were seeking 
to make their parenthood more intelligent, the con- 
tributions should have a wide publication. 

To them this book is dedicated, in the hope that 
it may suggest new ways of meeting their problems 
and fulfilling their responsibilities. 

The Association desires to record its deep sense 
of obligation to the scholars who have contributed 
the chapters composing the volume: to Dr. C. W. 
Kimmins, who, representing the Child Study Asso- 
ciation of London and the Parents’ Association in 
London, spoke at the dinner at the end of the Con- 
ference; to Dr. David Saville Muzzey of the Society 
for Ethical Culture, who acted as chairman at the 
dinner; and to Mrs. Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, di- 
rector of the Association, whose insight into the 
problems of parental education and whose untiring 
efforts in planning for the Conference have been of 
immeasurable value. 

Brrp STEIN GANS, President, 
Child Study Association of America, Inc. 


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CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTION . , ; ‘ i xf : 
By Bird Stein Gans 


Part I—The Family of To-day 
INTRODUCTION : : : : : 
By Dr. James E. Russell 


New RELATIONS OF MEN AND WOMEN AS 
Famity MEMBERS . ‘ ‘ 
By Beatrice M. Hinkle, M. D. 


Tue MoTHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY HoME . 
By Ethel Puffer Howes, Ph.D. 


THe FATHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY HOME 
By Elton G. Mayo, Ph.D. 


Part II1—The Family and the Community 


INTRODUCTION : Ae a ATO 
By Mary Kingsbury Sentech | 


THE Nursery ScHooL: A RESPONSE TO NEW 
NEEDS 
By Helen T. AWaolley, Ph. D. 


GETTING AWAY FROM THE FAMILY: THE 
ADOLESCENT AND His LiFe PLANS 
By Leta S. Hollingworth, Ph.D. 

THE FAMILY AS COORDINATOR OF COMMU- 


nity Forces 
By Ernest R. Groves, Ph. D. 


Part III—Parents and the New See 


INTRODUCTION 
By Bird Stein Gans 


THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARLY YEARS 
By D. A. Thom, M.D. 


FroM CHILDHOOD To YOUTH . i y k 
By Marion E, Kenworthy, M.D. 
ix 


PAGE 


24 


47 


49 


71 


118 


x CONTENTS 


CONFRONTING THE WortD: THE ADJUST- 
MENTS OF LATER ADOLESCENCE 
By Frankwood E. Williams, M.D. 


Part IV—Teachers and the Hee Education 


INTRODUCTION : : 
By Dr. Patty S. Hill 


TRAINING TEACHERS TO SEE THE WHOLE 


CHILD ; 
By Francis Mitchell F roelicher 


THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE GROUP 
By W. T. Root, Ph.D. 


NEWER MEANINGS OF DISCIPLINE 
By William Heard Kilpatrick, Ph.D. 


Part V—Leisure and Recreation 
INTRODUCTION A 
By Dr. Lee K. Frankel 
YOUTH AND PLAY-TIME . 
By Miriam Van Waters, Ph.D. 


Tue Errect oF MACHINE-MADE RECREATION 
ON FAmiLy LIFE . : 
By John M. Cooper, Ph.D. 


VACATIONS AS EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES 
By Mrs. Henry Moskowitz 


Part VI—The Parents’ Outlook on Life 


INTRODUCTION . 
By John Lovejoy Elliott, Ph. CD: 


Is RELIGION UNITING OR SEPARATING Us? . 
By George A. Coe, Ph.D. 

PARENTS, THE CONSTANT AND INEVITABLE 
EpucAToORS OF THEIR CHILDREN . 
By Anna Garlin Spencer 


FREEDOM FOR THE CHILD—WuHat Does It 
MEAN? ; 
By Dorothy Cached Righers 


PAGE 


137 


163 


165 
177 
195 


215 


ay 
231 


241 


255 
25/ 


265 


273 


PARLEY 
THE FAMILY OF TO-DAY 





SUGGESTED READING FOR PART I 


The Family and Its Members—Anna Garlin Spencer : 
Lippincott, 1923. 

Changes in Social Thought and Standards Which Af- 
fect the Family—Porter R. Lee; from The Family, 
July, 1923. 

The History of the Family as a Social and Educational 
Institution—Willystine Goodsell; Macmillan, 1915. 

The Psycho-analytic Study of the Family—J. C. Fligel; 
International Psychoanalytical Press, 1921. 

Euthenics;. the Science of Controllable Environment— 
Ellen H. Richards; Whitcomb and Barrows, 1910. 


THE FAMILY OF TO-DAY 


EACH maturing generation indulges in adverse 
criticism of the next succeeding generation. The 
good old time seems to have a peculiar fascination 
for those who themselves are growing old. Yet the 
fact is that in the typical American country village, 
of, say, sixty years ago—a community which had 
very positive religious beliefs, which knew there was 
a hell, and which went to church regularly on Sun- 
day while on week days it played with the devil when- 
ever opportunity offered—life was not all that some 
of the present-day critics seem to imagine. 

Comparing the past with the present we are con- 
vinced that there has been great change. Many 
causes doubtless conspire to bring about these 
changes, but there are two or three that stand out 
quite prominently. The first of these is the enor- 
mous change in transportation. Sixty years ago the 
ordinary range of American folk was bounded by a 
radius of seven miles, the length of a day’s drive 
with the old horse and buggy. The range of ac- 
quaintance to-day is that of the automobile, the air- 
plane and the railway, which unite in bringing the 
world into closer communion. 

In the old days the usual sources of information 
were a weekly newspaper, Harper’s, the Youth's 

3 


4 CONCERNING PARENTS 


Companion and perhaps a church paper. To-day we 
have not only one but perhaps two daily newspapers 
before breakfast, and because we are in doubt of the 
accuracy and truthfulness of the morning papers, we 
read one or two others at night. The movies and 
the radio, too, are conspiring to bring the world to 
our feet. . 

In matters of health there has perhaps been an 
even greater change. The terror of diphtheria and 
scarlet fever in those days cannot be imagined by 
the present generation. No wonder they had large 
families—the death toll from these two diseases alone 
frequently took half or two-thirds of all. Knowl- 
edge of the control of these diseases has made us no 
longer fear them. We have learned to have confi- 
dence in experts in medicine and in surgery. We 
are gaining confidence in experts in the field of psy- 
chology. In the upbringing of children there is a 
growing doubt as to the traditions of the past— 
doubt of the all-sufficient knowledge that is handed 
on by tradition. Because we doubt we look about 
for guidance in the hope of finding experts to show 
us the way. 

The home of to-day, as the home of the past, is 
made up of father and mother and children. It is 
therefore expedient that we consider the relation ex- 
isting between these three dominant factors. 

Dr. JAMES E. RUSSELL, 
Dean, Teachers College, 
Columbia University. 


NEW RELATIONS OF MEN AND 
WOMEN AS FAMILY MEMBERS 


By Beatrice M. Hinxte, M.D. 


In the many discussions—so popular at present— 
concerning the changes in family relationships there 
frequently appears an assumption that some new and 
highly desirable relation has actually taken form and 
that instead of the uncertainty, insecurity, and chaos 
which actually exist, resulting from the disintegra- 
tion of the old culture and family traditions, a vastly 
improved and highly satisfactory new relationship 
has evolved, and has replaced the former unsatisfac- 
tory condition. 

The most that can be said for this assumption is 
that it represents a fervid wish, but as. yet it is far 
from a reality. 

What then ts the actual situation? The family re- 
lations at the present time are largely dominated by 
the self-assertiveness of women, who are shaking off 
their old responsibilities. Women are in revolt from 
exclusive preoccupation with their ancient task of 
housewife and responsible agent for all that con- 
cerns the home. Accompanying this revolt is the 
dissolution of the oldtime theory of the divinely 
ordained superiority of man, largely produced by his. 

5 


6 CONCERNING PARENTS 


own assertions together with his personal freedom of 
action, and contact with a strange world of which 
women mostly were ignorant. 

For many years it has been a commonplace obser- 
vation that women in America dominated the home 
and family in an overwhelming degree. The wife 
and mother carried the entire responsibility for the 
training and education of the children, the father’s 
chief rdle being that of money-getter; otherwise he 
played very little part in any personal relation with 
the family. This exclusive position of women in the 
family in America has been a condition quite un- 
paralleled elsewhere. 

The great change that is occurring in the family 
relations is concerned with this condition. Formerly 
the wife, occupied during the day intensively with 
the care of the children and domestic duties, de- 
pended altogether upon the husband to bring her re- 
lief from the narrow limitations of the domestic life. 
He was in contact with other men and the big world 
outside during the day, and the evening was looked 
forward to by her for the freshness and entertain- 
ment which he would bring. On the other hand, the 
husband, wearied with his contacts and strains of the 
day, came home for quietness and rest, not to go 
over his daily experiences again with his wife. He 
wanted the same care and consideration from her 
that she had been meting out all day to her children 
and household, and not to be burdened with these 
responsibilities or demands. It is obvious that with 


MEN AND WOMEN AS FAMILY MEMBERS 7 


these two totally different needs which each person 
desired from the other there would be engendered 
in one or both a sense of dissatisfaction and discon- 
tent. Something had to happen in such a situation. 

The shouldering of the responsibility for the 
family, the determining of its decisions, the man- 
agement of its practical affairs, which were so en- 
tirely left to the wife by the American husband, 
engendered in her an independent attitude and the 
capacity for initiative and management which char- 
acterizes the American woman. Instead of remain- 
ing inside the home depending upon and hoping for 
satisfaction from the husband which failed to come, 
the wife, thrown back upon herself, began to seek 
and find opportunities and outlets elsewhere. The 
numerous study groups, women’s clubs and associ- 
ations which have sprung up all over the land have 
arisen in answer to this need of women to gain 
mental contacts with the outer world. The seeking 
of the married women for paying jobs and economic 
freedom is the expression of this same recognition 
that they must depend upon themselves for their re- 
lief and mental satisfactions rather than upon the 
husband and father. Inevitably a changed attitude 
within the family results. 

The woman no longer clings to the family in the 
same way as formerly when she was forced to do 
so as her sole mode of functioning. She has found 
that she has a place in the world outside, and is 
eagerly interested in its possibilities. The family is 


8 CONCERNING PARENTS 


often somewhat of a hindrance to this aim, just as 
itis to the man. As a result the woman is thinking 
of the family in more objective terms, and as some- 
thing separate from her personality. She has begun 
to function independently of it, and as a defined 
person instead of being identified with it, as she was 
in the past. 

With this revolutionary change in attitude there 
has arisen, in many instances, an appearance of care- 
lessness and disregard of the primary claims of the 
children; there is a growing tendency of the mother 
to shirk the responsibility just as the fathers have 
done, only in this instance there is no other parent 
on whom to push the care. 

This greater irresponsibility in regard to the chil- 
dren and the insistence of women upon having a life 
for themselves apart from the home has created 
alarm in the minds of many men, who see only dis- 
aster and ruin as the result of this attitude. The 
panic into which many masculine writers are thrown, 
and the predictions of dire disaster which are made 
as the inferior and weaker sex arise to their privi- 
leges would be laughable if it were not so tragic an 
indication of masculine inadequacy and helplessness 
before the growing power of women. 

I cannot do better than sketch the lurid picture 
drawn by one of the most recent writers on this sub- 
ject. Anthony Ludovici in a little book called ‘“Ly- 
sistrata” sees the present activity of women, if 
unchecked, leading directly to the overthrow of the 


MEN AND WOMEN AS FAMILY MEMBERS 9 


family and of present civilization. According to him 
the men will become more and more unnecessary as 
providers for the family until finally they will be- 
come entirely superfluous except for the purpose of 
fertilization. When this stage arrives, and the 
women have taken over the management and control 
of the business of the world, it will one time happen 
that food becomes scarce and famine threatens. 
Meetings will be called by the women to devise ways 
and means to protect and provide for the children, 
when it will suddenly occur to some that these super- 
fluous men, the unnecessary class in the community, 
who are food consumers, must be killed off; and 
then will ensue bloody street battles, in which the 
men will be destroyed except for the necessary few 
needed to keep the race continuous. Meantime, sci- 
ence, according to the predictions of Haldane, and 
other biologists, will have made possible the concep- 
tion and development of the foetus to maturity out- 
side of the woman’s body; ectogenesis, as it is called, 
will ultimately be the mode of human procreation, so 
that the children will be produced by the aid of sci- 
ence according to will and need, and the mating of 
woman and man will be no longer necessary for this 
purpose. Thus women will be relieved of the burden 
of sex disabilities caused by the carrying and birth 
of the child. Their freedom thus gained, they pre- 
sent from Ludovici’s standpoint a formidable rival 
before which mere man must quail. 

In this wildly extravagant phantasy, which is only 


IO CONCERNING PARENTS 


one of many put forth to-day by numerous masculine 
writers, there stands clearly revealed to him who is 
able to read, the deep underlying basis for the domi- 
nation and for all the restrictions which man has 
forced upon woman in the past and his insistence 
upon her inferiorities and incapacity to function in 
the superior way which was his birthright. 

They were born of an overwhelming fear of 
woman which lies deep in the soul of man. Although 
this fear may be unrecognized in consciousness by 
many men, a careful analysis of their attitudes and 
behavior will inevitably reveal the unconscious fear 
motive lying behind. However, the majority of men 
who are sufficiently conscious of themselves and 
honest about their feelings will frankly admit this 
fear which still persists almost unchanged in spite of 
the great changes in the external attitude of modern 
man towards women. 

It arises out of the biological condition of life 
itself: the fact that man is born of woman, and in 
his earliest and most impressionable days is subject 
to her and dependent upon her. The necessity which 
lies upon each individual creature to win its own in- 
dependence and separation from the parent stem, 
operates all unconsciously and drives the young in- 
dividual to detach himself from the clinging mater- 
nal love and from his own dependent love of his 
mother. The unconscious conflict between love 
which desires to hold fast to its original object, and 
the individualist ego with its need for power and 


MEN AND WOMEN AS FAMILY MEMBERS If 


freedom, is the origin of the deep fear ot the hidden 
power of woman which has dominated man’s rela- 
tion to her. It is this fear which is the source of 
the sex antagonism and rivalry about which we are 
constantly reminded by nearly all men writing upon 
these subjects. No normal woman possesses ary 
fundamental antagonism towards the man. It has 
arisen on her part only from definite acts of injustice 
and discrimination which he has forced upon her. 
The amazing thing about these terrifying predic- 
tions of family destruction and masculine overthrow, 
due to woman’s advancing power and the weakness 
of men, is that the only solution their authors can 
offer to prevent the catastrophe is a frantic appeal 
to men to bestir themselves to regain their power. 
They must try to return to the good old days when 
man was lord and master in fact, and woman humbly 
and tremblingly did his bidding, and in sorrow and 
pain brought forth his children, with whose disposi- 
tion or education she had not the slightest right to 
meddle. They entirely fail to see that the disturbing 
condition brought about by the revolt of women is 
the direct outcome of the masculine methods and in- 
ferior emotional attitudes which completely domi- 
nated the past in a wholly masculinized world. The 
lesson that should be learned from this sorry state of 
affairs—that any one-sided development is bound to 
come to grief, for its limit will inevitably be reached, 
when the inferior and undeveloped “other side” will 
of a certainty assert itself,—seems to be wholly un- 


12 CONCERNING PARENTS 


recognized. That in a world where both sexes exist, 
and men and women equally have capacities, needs 
and responsibilities, there is both room and need for 
the particular contributions of each sex, does not 
appear to cross the minds of these writers. They 
can only clutch at the bygone time of complete mas- 
culine supremacy, and pray for its return, so that the 
women can be reduced to their proper position—that 
of breeders and wholly dependent subjects. 

A private letter written by Auguste, Duchess of 
Brunswick, in 1700, naively expresses the former 
condition of women, even in the highest circles. She 
says, “The physicians wish that I may not be abreed- 
ing, aS my eyes are still so weak, and, as I give up 
so much to my lord, he might, I think, without losing 
of his authority, allow me first to get well. But men 
have no reason, and I have nothing to do but pray 
that God will be more merciful to me than His 
Serene Highness.”’ 

This state of dependence and helplessness is the 
condition that Ludovici calls “woman’s lost joy” and 
“former bliss,’ and which he generously hopes to 
see restored to them. I refer to this former status 
of women because only by remembering it, and con- 
trasting it with the present can the enormous change 
in women’s condition, and the disturbing effect it has 
produced upon men, be fully appreciated. 

It is this changed status of women, and their new 
and increased demands, that have created the new re- 
lations between men and women. Instead of the 


MEN AND WOMEN AS FAMILY MEMBERS 13. 


relations being based, as formerly, on the premise of 
sex inferiority and superiority, they are fast passing 
into that of equality, with differences. This condi- 
tion is one which so many masculine writers seem 
unable to understand, and which produces bewilder- 
ment in the minds of countless men. They can only 
conceive of the old order still existing with the 
values reversed, women now superior and men in- 
ferior. It is this phantom which terrifies them. 

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that to-day the 
relations between the sexes are in a state of disturb- 
ance and uncertainty, and that the family is seriously 
affected thereby. Many women are in great conflict 
over the rival claims of career and family, and have 
in no way arrived at a solution of the problem. Fur- 
thermore, among others the very newness of the 
freedom of opportunity and of the sense of their 
own value and independence has produced a headi- 
ness and inadequate adaptation to their new status, 
with a corresponding tendency to imitate man’s atti- 
tude and actually behave as he has done. For the 
very real problem of the feelings of superiority and 
inferiority and the “will to power,” is not one be- 
longing to sex but to the psychology of the particular 
individual regardless of sex. 

Unquestionably there are many women whose 
psychology is determined by the power motive, and 
who react towards men, when given the opportunity, 
in much the same way as men have done toward 
women. As they become conscious of themselves 


I4 CONCERNING PARENTS 


and aware of ego desires beyond those of sex appeal, 
the desire for power in the world of men enters into 
their soul in the same way as it has dominated the 
egotistic male through the ages. For the ruthless 
desire for power is the instinctive expression of the 
crude ego; and among many of our active, outwardly 
emancipated women does not this same egotistic 
struggle for power take place as dominantly as it does 
among men? 

If the predictions of the masculine alarmists are 
true, and all that is to be accomplished by women 
gaining a greater consciousness of self with an outer 
freedom and an equal opportunity in the world of 
affairs consists merely in a shifting of the same atti- 
tude of domination through greed for power from 
the shoulders of one sex to those of the other, I, too, 
would pray for the maintenance of the old condition 
as the lesser evil. 

However, it can hardly be doubted that ultimately, 
when the feeling of sex equality becomes thoroughly 
established among women, the all important problem 
of human relationships will occupy at least as promi- 
nent a place among their interests as the crude strug- 
gle for ego supremacy. In that one aim, the 
development of true relationships, lies material for 
the greatest distinction between a world where 
women function and one dominated exclusively by 
men. 

The beginnings of the new relationships are 
already in evidence. There is an honesty and frank- 


MEN AND WOMEN AS FAMILY MEMBERS 15 


ness in the attitude of women towards men which is 
entirely new, and is the direct fruit of the growing 
independence of women. For example instead of 
all women pretending to be devoted mothers because 
that was the attitude expected of women by men, 
numbers have gained the courage to admit that they 
are not adapted to this role. Every normal woman 
can bear a child, but not all are true mothers in the 
real sense of that term. That this was always so 
is evidenced by the army of unadapted, inadequate 
men and women who reveal very clearly the faulti- 
ness and inefficiency in their upbringing, and an- 
nounce by their presence more eloquently than any 
argument could do, that something more is necessary 
in the care of a child than the ability to bring it to 
physical maturity. 

The family has been more important to women in 
the past than to men chiefly because it was the one 
place where the active energy of women could find 
an outlet. Now that all other opportunities for ac- 
tivity are open, it becomes clear that the proper care 
and rearing of children is no more a suitable task for 
all women than any one profession is for all men. 
The recognition of this is the first effect of the new 
relations of men and women upon the family. 

With the acknowledgment of the actual situation 
on the part of women, they are demanding that the 
_men share the family responsibility and the men, on 
their side, are exhibiting a greater inclination to con- 
sider their part of the duty. The women are de- 


16 CONCERNING PARENTS 


manding a partnership relation in fact instead of in 
theory, and at the same time they are very keenly 
alive to the need for a more adequate knowledge and 
training in the difficult task of child-rearing than 
they have possessed before. It is very rarely that 
one hears a mother say, “This is how I was raised, 
and what was good enough for me is good enough 
for my children.”” The quickening in every direction 
over that which concerns the child is the most prom- 
ising phenomenon of our time, and is making for an 
entirely new attitude on the part of mothers towards 
themselves in relation to their children. 

Modern family conditions which so frequently in- 
clude the necessity for the mother to contribute 
financially to the family budget are primarily respon- 
sible for the most important venture in present day 
education, the nursery school. Begun in England 
aS an experiment in baby education for the children 
of the poor, working mothers, it was brought over 
here for just the opposite class: the intellectual and 
well-to-do families who can afford the rather expen- 
sive tuition involved. The significance of this move- 
ment is very great, for it carries implications much 
more profound than appear on the surface. Little 
children of eighteen months and two years who in 
other times were either left to the care of ignorant 
nurses or were cared for by nervous, overburdened 
mothers, who either foolishly indulged or impatiently 
corrected their missteps, can now be given into the 


MEN AND WOMEN AS FAMILY MEMBERS 17 


custody of intelligent, professionally trained young 
women. These women possessing fresh energy and 
detachment provide a child’s world in which young 
children in company with many others of their own 
age, can be allowed to develop along simple normal 
lines under suitable stimuli provided especially for 
their needs. 

I remember a dream put forth many years ago by 
some intellectual friends who were arguing for the 
need of rescuing children from their ill-regulated 
families, of a state-controlled infantorium where 
children would be brought up under somewhat simi- 
lar lines to the plan for the State care of children 
held by the Socialists of those days. We know what 
a sad substitute the State would make for even poor 
family care of little children, but it has seemed to 
me that in the development of the nursery school we 
find embodied all possible advantages that the best 
State management could offer, coupled with even 
superior advantages over those that the ordinary 
parents can contribute. 

The chief difficulty in the care of little children in 
the home consists in the overwhelming effect of the 
parents’ conduct upon the child. It is not what we 
say that counts but what we do—not our intention 
but our action that produces the lasting effect. 
Words mean little to small children, but the subjec- 
tive relation of the child to his environment is enor- 
mous; and thus, without words at all, his reactions 


18 CONCERNING PARENTS 


are determined, his habits created, and all the com- 
plex of impressions and motivations evoked that de- 
termine his entire future life. 

It is very obvious why the human race repeats 
with unending monotony the same mistakes, the same 
stupidities, generation after generation, regardless 
of the cultural changes that occur. These latter 
merely serve to produce a change of garment beneath 
which the same old attitudes operate. The genera- 
tions are bound to each other by unbreakable psychic 
bonds, and even before self-consciousness arises in 
the child, he is already conditioned by the emotional 
immaturities and conflicts of his parents. His de- 
veloping youth continues and deepens this condition- 
ing, so that the psychology of the majority of 
people is entirely determined by the early environ- 
mental influences, either repeating in slightly differ- 
ent dress or else reacting against the emotional states 
of their parents. And when one realizes that by far 
the larger number of parents are emotionally unde- 
veloped, and consequently quite blind to their own 
inadequate attitudes and reactions, which are indeli- 
bly impressing themselves on the sensitive organism 
of the child, it is entirely understandable why stu- 
dents of human conduct and sociologists begin to 
despair of ever finding in the family conditions 
which will contribute to a more emotionally mature 
and evolved humanity. The help that we can give 
the children can only begin in one way or another, 
with the present generation of adults. We who are 


MEN AND WOMEN AS FAMILY MEMBERS I9 


actually or potentially parents and teachers must be- 
come sufficiently self-aware to realize that all of our 
efforts to understand the child and to deal with him 
more effectively lead back inevitably to our own in- 
adequate emotional development, and the necessity of 
self-understanding and _ self-training. Conscious 
knowledge and intention play the smallest part 
in the training of children; unconscious behavior and 
emotional attitudes dominate the field. 

My own experiences have convinced me that so 
long as ego inferiorities and the consequent insati- 
able and subtle “will to power,’ are the dominant 
forces in human psychology instead of the principle 
of love and the will to adequate human relations, the 
conflict in the soul of the individual will go on end- 
lessly projecting the dissatisfied desires and unful- 
filled wishes upon the oncoming generation. Thus 
unconsciously the helpless child is used as the object 
from which to gain release. 

Many modern parents are aware of these dangers 
and in their efforts to protect the children they have 
gone to the other extreme. They are afraid and in- 
secure in their attitude, and in their fear of inter- 
fering with the child and of that overworked word, 
repression, they mistake impulse for a willed direc- 
tion. 

Every child possesses numerous impulses which 
arise spontaneously, for this is the nature of im- 
pulse, and dominate the field. To encourage or allow 
the child simply to follow indiscriminately whatever 


20 CONCERNING PARENTS 


impulse arises within him is not freedom for the 
child, but slavery to the most destructive and im- 
perious master known to the human being. The 
impulses of the human creature are not organized 
and controlled by nature according to fixed laws as 
they are among animals; their organization and con- 
trol for the benefit of the total personality, or the 
organism as a whole, has to be gained by the indi- 
vidual for himself and this has been the aim and 
purpose of all the discipline and restrictions imposed 
by our cultural patterns. However, the old methods 
of achieving this aim have lost their value, and with 
the acquisition of greater knowledge of the human 
being their weaknesses have become clear, so that 
they no longer can serve their purpose, — 

The necessity for discovering new and more ade- 
quate methods for producing the needed coordination 
and synthesis of impulses is very urgent. 

The present unrest of women with the consequent 
disturbed family relations offers the psychological 
condition out of which new ways of life may be 
born; for in the women’s awakening consciousness 
of their needs and their efforts to understand these 
problems lies the possibility of creating a new and 
better human world. 

Unconscious conflicts and dissatisfactions are de- 
structive; conscious conflicts and dissatisfactions are 
creative and constructive. They drive to the finding 
of causes and cures. That is why the unconscious 
and inarticulate attitude of the women in the family 


MEN AND WOMEN AS FAMILY MEMBERS 2r 


of the past, the loss of which men are everywhere de- 
ploring, has been so costly to the human race. For 
the race can rise no higher than the women who bear 
it. The new relations between men and women that 
are now coming into being demand an emotional 
maturity on the part of each person, and the mar- 
riage ceremony marks the beginning of the great 
opportunity for the development of the personalities 
of each participant. No more can the maternal 
woman gain a pseudosatisfaction by indulgently ac- 
cepting the husband and father as “a great over- 
grown boy,” or the man yield to his weakness by 
indulging the wife and mother in her childish humors 
and emotional outbursts, chuckling to himself at 
“the ways of women.” It is this changed attitude 
on the part of men and women that inevitably must 
produce a great effect upon the children. 

The present movement of women away from the 
care of family and home represents the reaction from 
the past cultural implications that this work was less 
important and on a lower plane, than that of a man 
digging a ditch or selling real estate. 

Intelligent parents, however, are beginning to 
realize their tremendous responsibility, and with the 
development of more adequate relations to each other 
the idea is slowly growing that, instead of the rear- 
ing of children and care of the family being an in- 
ferior job, it is one in which the greatest knowledge 
and the highest professional skill is required. 

The interest in home and family will gradually 


22 CONCERNING PARENTS 


come into its own again, but never in the old way of 
the past. Just as in business life of all kinds, the 
demand of to-day is for educated, college-trained 
men in place of those whose equipment was gained 
entirely from trial and error, so the labor of family 
care and rearing will be put on a professional basis, 
with only those eligible who have qualified by as 
strict a training as is required for any other of the 
modern professions, whether this be the mother or 
some other woman, self-conscious, adapted, and 
trained for the profession of child rearing. 

Those parents who have no inclination for this 
profession will then without shame or resentment, 
avail themselves of the nursery schools, or other so- 
cial agencies, for more adequate care of their chil- 
dren than they are competent to give. This will give 
to the child a release from the emotional intensity of 
parents, and an opportunity to gain, in the freer and 
more genuinely socialized atmosphere, a real adap- 
tation and relation to the world about him. 

With the passing of the psychic and economic de- 
pendence of woman upon man, there will emerge 
a quickened consciousness of self with the oppor- 
tunity for the maturing of the emotional attitudes 
associated with the ego. This will inevitably bring 
about a new family relationship, one in which the 
volitional and creative energies of two people will co- 
operate to produce a condition conducive to their 
highest functioning, and therefore an atmosphere 
most desirable for the children. No adequate hu- 


MEN AND WOMEN AS FAMILY MEMBERS 23 


man relationship can be developed in which depend- 
ency, weakness and inferiority form the underlying 
basis of the association and this situation has been 
the foundation of countless family relationships of 
the past. 

In every new movement the most undesirable 
aspects are primarily in evidence. The modern fam- 
ily already reflects some of the first effects of the 
looser parental attitude, frequently in a form that 
seems far from desirable. Less family responsi- 
bility, and a careless attitude on the part of the 
adults, is reproduced by the children, and license is 
mistaken for freedom. But this condition, so char- 
acteristic of to-day, is inevitable when such a pro- 
found change is in progress. Bonds are loosening 
and in the wholly changed attitude within the family 
there lies the possibility of either complete disrup- 
tion of all that has been valuable in the past, or of 
a higher and finer ethical relation than has been 
known before. Responsibility volitionally assumed, 
and a willing acceptance of that which is necessary, 
is a higher attainment than acceptance demanded by 
outer force and pressure. The true mission of 
woman is the bringing of these new values into hu- 
man relationships both within and without the fam- 
ily, and in the success of this achievement lies the 
hope of the world. 


THE MOTHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY 
HOME 


By ErHet Purrer Howes, Px.D. 


Director, Institute for the Co-ordination of Women’s 
Interests, Smith College 


Part of the mother’s problem is perhaps sym- 
bolized in a colloquy with my three-year old son. 
Dressing him one day, I lapsed into a customary 
“murmur of ‘darling little lamb—” whereupon—“I’m 
not a lamb!” he shot back. “Don’t call me lamb! 
Call me tiger!’ Yes, that is what he needs first of 
all! To be seen for what he ts, to be understood, to 
be let to play his own role. But to bring successfully 
to pass the free development of the child’s individ- 
uality, many things must work together for good 
through them that love him. 

What mothers must provide, beyond milk, orange- 
juice, spinach, and cod-liver oil, right habits of feed- 
ing and bathing and behaving,—is a firm founda- 
tion for the child’s universe. Affection, serenity, 
order, continuity, justice, sympathy, freedom must 
flow from her. Perhaps the greatest of these is 
serenity. If there is any one thing we have to be 
grateful for to the scientists and teachers of mental 
hygiene to-day, it is the discovery and demonstra- 

24 


THE MOTHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY HOME 25 


tion of these elements in the child’s daily atmosphere 
which are most essential to the normal development 
of adult life. 

The most striking thing about this new knowledge 
of children’s mental needs is that it can be acquired 
for all practical purposes by the person who needs 
to possess it. No longer is one a competent mother 
by chance or the grace of God; if an incompetent 
mother it is by choice. No longer shall we hear 
from the occasional militant feminist that some are 
born to be skilled mothers, some not; and that those 
untalented for child-care should leave their children 
largely to the care of those who are so talented. 
These benefactors of humanity, the scientific stu- 
dents of child-nature, have now made it possible for 
every mother, if she be sincere and humble-minded, 
to learn to guide herself aright in dealing with tender 
souls, as she could once learn only how to deal with 
tiny bodies. Nothing is a duty that is not possible 
—but now that it zs possible it is surely the duty of 
every woman who brings a soul into the world, to 
school herself to cherish it aright. 

If you affirm the scientific worth of the findings 
of the mental hygienists, it follows logically that to 
keep order, serenity, continuity, stability in the chil- 
dren’s background there must be virtually shut out 
lots of interesting possibilities for active women— 
voyaging, adventure, outside jobs—and inside 
quarrels. The only real obstacle to the attainment 
of the essential qualities in the mental background of 


26 CONCERNING PARENTS 


the child is the absence of these qualities in the spirit 
of the mother herself. 

How diffuse serenity unless you have achieved it? 
But if there is to-day any one less sure of her own 
vital needs and her own central aims than the aver- 
age mother, I don’t know the creature. Why is 
this? If I may speak out from a thirty years’ ex- 
perience of all types of women, I should say it 1s 
because of the conflict between the traditional in- 
variable and therefore generic demands of wifehood 
and motherhood, and those demands, first frankly 
recognized in the last generation, perhaps, of the 
specific individual person that she is. This is not 
at all to my mind a matter of the so-called “career”’ 
or “self-expression” in the accepted sense. Perhaps 
I might put it in this way—in general, all fathers 
have to be providers, and all mothers have to be 
nurturers. But fathers, by hypothesis, do their pro- 
viding each in his own particular way, according to 
his own talents and special interests. Mothers do 
their nurturing according to the needs of their off- 
spring, not each with reference to her own talents or 
interests. | 

If that means inhibition for every mother, how 
much more for the choicer intelligences, who press 
on during a fearless unconscious youth to the devel- 
opment of the talent and the work they love, only to 
find that with marriage and motherhood the intrinsic 
worth of their individual interest seems to have 
vanished—at least from every one’s mind but their 


THE MOTHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY HOME 27 


own! Talk of suppressed desires! It’s suppressed 
powers that I believe is at the root of much restless- 
ness and instability among our women to-day and I 
have found psychiatrists to agree with me. 

The fact is, society has now no frame for the 
mother who needs also to be a person. It puts a 
premium on the specialization of the male, at the 
same time stressing the generic quality of the female 
not only to the extent rendered necessary by the con- 
ditions of child-nurture, but to an extreme extent 
of waste and disparagement of the woman’s powers 
as an individual. The result is, that women’s higher 
education, so far as it is specialized, has a certain 
unreality, through its quick fading out in the present 
normal life of marriage and motherhood. 

It is true that for women of an executive type, 
interested in civic matters, present day life offers 
many and varied, if scattered, opportunities. But 
for those whose interests are not primarily those of 
execution, there is little opportunity for any intrinsi- 
cally valuable activity. The purely cultural interests 
of reading, concerts, club life, etc., are passive, 
esthetic in character. They do not fill the need. 
What chance of internal serenity for those who, of 
active mind or intellectual endowment, are increas- 
ingly conscious of a certain intellectual frustration, 
even in the happiest family conditions? 

It is to meet this situation, and to solve this prob- 
lem of the educated intelligent woman, ever more 
clearly presenting itself with the increase in the num- 


28 CONCERNING PARENTS 


bers of our married alumnz, that Smith College has 
recently undertaken a new plan of research. This 
research is to answer the question:—How can I 
combine my natural life of the affections with the 
intensive intellectual or professional activity which 
is half my life, and combine it in an integral way? 
By integral, | mean accepted, planned for from the 
beginning of education, provided for by the current 
social arrangements, acknowledged as also of in- 
trinsic worth. 

The way to the answer to that question will lie in 
the working out of household and social rearrange- 
ments such as can be applicable to all young people 
just beginning a modest family life, so that the intel- 
lectual (or artistic, etc.) life can actually be lived 
without interference with the personal life. And sec- 
ondly, through the exploration and modification of 
the various professions and allied occupations, so that 
activity of professional (not amateur) quality, but 
- free-lance as to time and place, may be allowed, rec- 
ognized, or even paid for. This will have to come 
through study of the records, first, of individuals— 
how they have adjusted, their successes and failures 
(for it is from failures you learn most) ; secondly, 
from study of the previous social experiments in re- 
organization (which if failures are also most inter- 
esting) in the way of methods of release. Thirdly, 
from exploration, discovery, invention and experi- 
ment in new ways to live. 

Our first studies will be concerned with codperative 


THE MOTHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY HOME 29 


nurseries and nursery schools, with cooperative food- 
supply, laundries and personal service organiza- 
tions, because these seem first to offer the neces- 
sary qualities of automatic, inexpensive, superior 
types of release for the thoughtful mother from her 
present bondage, not to the essentials of loving child- 
nurture, but to the non-essentials of the house as 
factory. 

It will not be many years, I hope, before the con- 
flicts between the ideal interests of the mother in the 
present-day home will be resolved into a clear vision 
of the ways to inner harmony. In that day, those 
other qualities of the home background which I 
named as essential—justice, insight, freedom—will 
be more easily attained. 

What most children need to-day is to have the 
mother sincerely interested in something worthy 
apart from them. We can hardly measure, I believe, 
what sensitive-natured children suffer from the in- 
tense, sustained concentration upon them of the con- 
scientious, otherwise mentally unoccupied, mother. 
They need letting alone. They need shade. ‘You 
can’t be happy when you're being loved all the time,” 
says Martin, Christopher Morley’s symbol of child- 
hood, in “Thunder on the Left.” I once knew a 
young student with a most devoted mother. “TI can’t 
work,” he said once, ‘“‘for I know she’s always sit- 
ting out there beyond my door thinking about me!” 

Children are like wild animals—you’ve got to pre- 
tend not to be looking at them if they are to be really 


30 CONCERNING PARENTS 


comfortable, or free. And it’s in that sense of free- 
dom to think their own long, long thoughts of youth 
that young things grow and blossom. For the 
mother to be happily occupied in her own concerns, 
happily unaware of her child’s, but ready—is the 
mental breath of life for him. 

For the older children and youth, more truly now 
than ever before, a necessity of guidance is the re- 
spect and admiration for the parents’ own powers, 
achievement and standing. Youth, above all rebel- 
lious youth, needs to hero-worship. I believe that 
much of the break-up of the family and family in- 
fluence which we hear of to-day as the source of all 
our troubles, could be avoided if the parents, and 
beyond all the mother, were poised in herself, in that 
inner harmony of all her powers which gives serenity 
and gains respect and following. 


THE FATHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY 
HOME 


By Etton G. Mayo 


Research Associate, Wharton School, University of 
Pennsylvania 


It is too often assumed that we know what we 
mean by the words, “father,” “mother,” and 
“home.” In point of fact, considered apart from the 
mere questions of biological paternity and maternity, 
we do not know what these words mean at all. 

The home as a social unit has never been the basis 
of civilization, in spite of declarations to the con- 
trary. Consequently, we do not really know the 
place of the father, the mother and the children in 
the home. The idea that the home should be the 
social unit of civilization is a possibility that we have 
begun to see upon the horizon. 

If one takes the actual historical and anthropologi- 
cal facts, one finds that our societies derive from 
primitive clans organized under mother-right and 
father-right. With the increase in power in modern 
times of state and church, the clan system broke 
down; and out of the ensuing chaos has come the be- 
ginnings of what we now call marriage and the 

31 


32 CONCERNING PARENTS 


family. Hobhouse, Westermarck, Rivers and other 
writers on the topic, call attention to the fact that 
the family is an ideal which civilization is trying to 
achieve but which has been only partially achieved. 

This does not mean that there have never been 
happy marriages; that there have never been happy 
homes; that fortunate children have not owed every- 
thing to the normality and happiness of their infan- 
tile surroundings. But the argument that we should 
go back to any former régime is always dangerous 
and is also, if I may say so, stupid. First, because 
we cannot, if we would, return; as the social order 
changes, so does family life. Second, because even 
if we could go back to a superseded social order we 
should not necessarily achieve happy family life. 
The probability is that happiness in the home was 
not an invariable result of any particular marriage 
system, but was rather in the nature of a happy acci- 
dent. 

It is true, nevertheless, that we owe something of 
achievement to the fact that happy homes have ex- 
isted; and it becomes imperative, therefore, that we 
should attempt to discover precisely what was the 
nature of the home which brought about specially 
fortunate education for the child. 

There is another reason why we should attack this 
problem: Leading psychiatrists in the United States 
and abroad have committed themselves in recent 
years over and over again to the assertion that they 

™ know of no case of nervous breakdown in those in- 


THE FATHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY HOME 33 


dividuals who have begun life in the surroundings 
of a happy home. 

In discussing disorders occurring in those unfor- 
tunate children who have not had the right sort of 
home, Pierre Janet calls attention to certain outstand- 
ing symptoms. He says that the psycho-neurotic at- 
titude is rather “the negation of the present than the 
affirmation of the past.” The relation of a neurotic 
with the present reality about him is defective. Janet 
proceeds to examine in detail this psycho-neurotic 
attitude to present reality. He finds that such an 
individual suffers a diminished capacity for produc- 
ing the organic tension which is necessary to the per- 
ception of or action upon reality. 

Without going too deeply into this discussion, I 
may express my belief that the criterion Janet applies 
to the individual is admirable. We do commonly 
apply such a criterion to the physical activities of 
young men and young women. We “pick teams” 
by determining which individuals or which groups of 
individuals can adapt most alertly and quickly to 
changes in the tactics of the other side. We fail, 
however, to adopt the same principle in determining 
mental capacity and adaptation. We ask students 
to accept and to learn rather than to break through 
and think for themselves. Our educational scheme 
suffers general imperfections here. 

Janet also points out that there is a very direct 
analogy to the mental mood that overcomes us in 
fatigue. When we are fatigued, the adequacy of our 


34 CONCERNING PARENTS 


relation to reality is diminished. This brings on 
temporary symptoms entirely similar to those of 
nervous breakdown, a fact that has been confirmed 
in a very interesting fashion by Dr. Kleitman of the 
University of Chicago in experiments extending over 
the last two years. He finds that if he induces some 
of his normal, healthy students to go without sleep 
for several nights in succession and to keep their 
muscles contracted sufficiently to prevent themselves 
from sleeping, symptoms of abnormality follow. On 
the second day these students were unable to write 
legibly. After three days a student who could still 
do a performance test with entire accuracy made a 
comment which seemed a little irrelevant. Inquiry 
showed that although he was doing the performance 
test accurately, he believed himself to be conducting 
an argument on trade unionism with a fellow-stu- 
dent. Kleitman finds in the normal but fatigued 
person the precise symptoms one meets in a nervous 
disorder. 

Our mental capacities are determined by our 
capacity, first, for physiological organic tension, or 
integration, as the neurologists call it. If we can 
produce this tension, then we can relate ourselves 
adequately and alertly to the reality about us. At any 
given time, it may be physical causes such as fatigue, 
that prevent us from achieving the necessary tension 
or it may be mental causes traceable to education. 

This disorder being characteristic of those who 
have had an unfortunate infancy, we can proceed 


THE FATHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY HOME 35 


from Janet’s definition of psychasthenia to direct 
consideration of what the parent may do for the 
child to help it in its efforts in the direction of an 
adequate freedom. 

Freedom is not represented by the carrying out of 
sudden desires. Our very early ancestors (disowned 
by the anti-evolutionists ) could do so much, but they 
achieved no considerable freedom, as Dr. Kohler has 
shown in his experiments with the chimpanzee. Real 
freedom is learning how to order one’s attitude and 
method of attack. The parent must help the child 
to achieve this self-control. If one looks from 
Janet’s discussion back into the mists of one’s own 
childhood, or to one’s observation of children, or to 
observations on the child that have been made by dis- 
tinguished scientists, one finds that the world of the 
child is extraordinarily different from the world of 
the adult. One finds that the child does need a 
great deal of help in precisely the respect described © 
by Janet, his capacity to “get hold of”’ reality. 

Parents help in this for good or ill; they are the 
adults who count for most in this. So, however far 
the educational system is developed, the need for the 
right type of parent is nothing diminished. Indeed, 
the more complicated the educational system, the 
more agencies there are to help and instruct the child, 
the more necessary does it become that this back- 
ground of his life (without which all the rest of edu- 
cation is useless) shall be handled adequately by 
parents in the home. 


36 CONCERNING PARENTS 


I do not mean to deny the value of special educa- 
tion nor the need that a child should get his discipline 
chiefly from other children of his own age. I wish 
merely to affirm that the supplementation which pa- 
rental affection and understanding give, is also nec- 
essary. A courageous attitude toward the vast 
reality about us is so, and perhaps only so, derived. 
Why is it, for example, that the incidence of de- 
linquency and psychoneurotic disorder is high in 
institutional children? Perhaps we have the reasons 
here. The parental reassurance in their lives is lack- 
ing, and they fail to achieve that happy confidence in 
their capacity to handle reality, without which no 
one can live a normal or satisfactory civilized life. 

The child is very like the savage in many ways. 
The child cannot distinguish, as the adult does, be- 
tween dream and reality. Even the adult cannot 
always make the necessary discrimination. Very 
often we take to the office a mood that is justified 
not by anything that has actually happened to us in 
the day or the previous day, but finds its cause or 
origin in a dream, perhaps forgotten, of the night 
before. If this affects the civilized adult, it affects 
the child still more. | 

Frazer, in his “Golden Bough,” has gathered to- 
gether many instances showing that Indians, for 
example, in South America make no attempt to 
distinguish the reality of the dream from the 
reality of their waking life. An Indian acting 
as a porter to an explorer refused to carry his 


THE FATHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY HOME 37 


load one day, saying that he had dreamed that he 
had been on a far journey in the night and con- 
sequently felt tired. The attitude of child and 
savage to shadows and to their names is, also, ex- 
traordinarily similar. A small girl had written her 
name in the sand and flew into a passion when a 
small boy trod upon it. Her name was part of her- 
self and not discriminated from her personality. In 
the mentality of the child and its attitude to reality, 
one finds reflection of the primitive, and reflection 
also of the fear which is at the back of all primitive 
_ belief in magic. 

We must keep in mind this recurring difficulty for 
the child: that the events of the day occur against a 
background which is almost entirely unknown. 
What would the experiences of the day be like to 
any one of us if they occurred in a setting or against 
a background which was all unknown? 

What is the function of the parent? When a 
child has had a terror dream, it does not want to be | 
told that ‘there is nothing there.’ It wants to be’ 
assured that the parent will not allow it to be harmed. 
The function of the parent is to interpret reality in 
terms of reassurance. The child must be helped to 
develop the serenity which is a necessary condition of 
mental growth and education. And if a serene 
mental hinterland has been an important factor in 
the past history of man, it is a factor the present im- 
portance of which is nothing diminished. As we 
have more to teach the child, as we try to develop 


38 CONCERNING PARENTS 


it in the same short period of living to a higher 
knowledge and a better understanding of the world 
it lives in, then, far from minimizing the importance 
of mental serenity, modern education makes a greater 
demand of it. The more intense the attention the in- 
dividual has to give to this or that aspect of his 
world, the more necessary is it that there should be 
some satisfactory personal reassurance. Our first 
faith in the universe derives from our parents. 

I propose now, for a moment, to look at certain 
aspects of the modern development of the home. 
The first is the aspect of personal intimacy and the 
sex relation in marriage. The second is the eco- 
nomic, and the third the social aspect. 

In every society, from the most primitive to our 
own, there has always been an endeavor to systema- 
tize the relation between men and women, to guard 
against this intimate relation becoming or breaking 
down into mere biological accident. Societies based 
on mother-right, father-right and clan organization, 
no less than our own, are to be understood as an 
endeavor to introduce something of social order into 
this most intimate relation, to guard the society 
from too high an incidence of chance and irregu- 
larity in this aspect. This has led all through the 
course of human history to the implication of some- 
thing derogatory in the sex relation. It has never 
apparently been considered an important social func- 
tion, even though Church and State have been forced 
at all stages of civilized development to recognize it 








THE FATHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY HOME 39 


as such. There are qualifying clauses in the mar- 
riage service of the Church of England, just as there 
are qualifying clauses in the attitude of almost every 
one of us to this very important problem. Lecky, 
in his “History of European Morals,” points out 
that the Christian Church in the Middle Ages took a 
very extraordinary attitude toward women. It wasa 
double attitude. On the one hand, a woman was 
worshiped as the Mother of God, and there were just 
as many women saints as men; yet, on the other 
hand, certain hermits regarded woman as “the door 
_ to hell,” a source of temptation and corruption even 
of the saints. This is curiously inconsistent with 
_the very enlightened move made by the Church in 
the direction of constituting mutual affection as the 
only basis of justification for marriage and in the 
direction of constituting the family as the real social 
unit. 

Thus the attitude of the ascetics toward marriage 
was extraordinary, as was also their attitude toward 
fatherhood. Lecky quotes Cassian as claiming that 
the highest virtue is the ascetic virtue. A man who 
desires to be a monk, if he has been a father, must 
be taught to forget that he is a father. Lecky tells 
of a case where a child is tortured, day by day, in 
front of the father, until such time as this father 
(who desires to be a monk) can neither show nor 
feel any emotion with respect to the suffering in- 
flicted upon the small son. One finds something of 
the same attitude in the Upanishads. “If a man, 


40 CONCERNING PARENTS 


though well enlightened, is still possessed by passion 
and darkness and attached to his children, wife and 
house, then perfect Yoga is never accomplished.” 
“Passion and darkness” include affection for chil- 
dren, wife and home. This is.an attitude which has 
been very curiously mixed up with the more enlight- 
ened attitude in the Christian Church and in human 
development generally—the more enlightened atti- 
tude that the relation of intimacy between men and 
women is the highest relation of all, and must be the 
basis of any successful social order. 

The second point is the economic aspect of family 
relations. There have been such great changes in 
the last hundred years that it is very difficult for us 
to argue back from family life as it is now to family 
life as it was even a short century ago in Europe. 
The life of the woman in father-right Europe, in 
the medieval period, was probably not so socially 
ineffective nor so unhappy as we might think. In all 
probability, the women of the village were the most 
effective persons in it. The whole economic organi- 
zation of the group centered in them and some of the 
modern unhappiness in family living has resulted 
from an endeavor to retain the form which led to 
happiness a century ago and can no longer do so. 
Woman has gained a certain social independence and 
has at the same time, one might say, lost her eco- 
nomic function in the home. Her former duties, 
from making of bread to the making of cloth, were 
not merely duties but her highest pride and pleasure. 


THE FATHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY HOME 4lI 


These things have been taken from her and no sub- 
stitute has yet been found. So if there is nothing 
left for her to do but to take an excessive interest 
in her children, her loss of real social function is 
sure to be disadvantageous. We still talk of the 
home in public as if the nineteenth century had not 
been. The economic position, the social function of 
women has altered almost completely in that time, 
and this must have its consequences for mother, for 
father and for children. 

The woman, no less than the man, needs an in- 
terest that will relate her with the society outside 
the home. If she is left in the house behind closed 
doors with nothing whatever to do, then of course all 
the worst results that can be anticipated will neces- 
sarily follow. 

My third point deals with the social side of family 
life and here I can only look at certain aspects of the 
question and make guesses. I am not entitled to say 
what is the place of the father or the mother or the 
children in the modern home. It seems to me, how- 
ever, that certain aspects of this modern home life of 
ours are emerging and becoming comparatively clear. 
The whole area of mental hygiene work seems to 
show that every one of us needs an active working 
relation with the society about us. This working re- 
lation must be independent of our relation with so- 
ciety through our associates in the home. This 
applies to the father, of course (it has for many 
centuries) ; it applies to the mother, and the children 


42 CONCERNING PARENTS 


too. For sanity, for a sense of social function, it is 
necessary for each one of us, whatever our place in 
the home, shall have not only an indirect relation 
with the society about us mediated through the home, 
but a direct relation of our own. And we find our 
serenity, our happiness, our comprehension of both 
spheres, by learning to understand and know some- 
thing in each direction. As the economic function 
of the woman failed, there was a tendency, in Eu- 
rope at least, to impose upon her an isolation in the 
home which could no longer be justified, since it was 
no longer true that she found her chief social func- 
tions there. 

It seems clear also that every one of us needs a 
background of personal affection and comfort as 
distinguished from anything we can possibly get in 
the wide world outside, that only so can we fight a 
successful battle with the very complex modern 
civilization. Affection and serenity, the comfort of 
understanding in the home, are infinitely more im- 
portant than direction or discipline. Direction and 
discipline, the training that comes by trial and error 
and instruction, these things are acquired by father, 
mother and child, outside the home. In order that 
one may benefit to the highest degree by the direction 
in work and development that come from outside the 
home, it is necessary that there should be a steady 
background of affection, support and comfort within 
it. Without this background, no one of us can easily 


THE FATHER IN THE PRESENT-DAY HOME 43 


keep up the struggle to know, to understand, and to 
do whatever work we have to do in the world. 

By this road a new principle of laissez-faire is 
emerging—the principle of letting every individual, 
father, mother or child, work out his own salvation. 
But there emerges also a new duty—that of mental 
support and understanding, contributed mutually by 
the group. In sucha family unit, the older phrases, 
such as obedience and discipline, will find an alto- 
gether different meaning. 





BARTOLI 
THE FAMILY AND THE COMMUNITY 


SUGGESTED READING FOR PART II 


Mothers and Children—Dorothy Canfield Fisher; Holt, 
1914. 
School and Home—Angelo Patri; Appleton, 1925. 


Intelligent Parenthood—Chicago Association for Child 
' Study and Parent Education; University of Chicago 


Press, 1926. 

Youth in Conflict—Miriam Van Waters; New Republic, 
Inc., 1925. 

A Nursery School Experiment—Harriett M. Johnson; 
Bureau of Educational Experiments, 1924. 


The Progressive Parent—Progressive Education, Octo- 
ber, November, December, 1926, 





THE FAMILY AND THE COMMUNITY 


No mother can work out her family problems in- 
dependently. If she thinks that she can, she soon 
finds herself caught in the network of forces which 
surround her. In our big communities there is no 
drawing water from the well or milk from the cow. 
The mother is dependent upon boards of health and 
upon the conditions that exist in farms four hundred 
miles away. Perhaps she cannot have the clothing 
she wants for her child. A national tariff may de- 
termine this question for her. The child may not be 
able to take his naps if the land values are so high 
that rents have gone up and crowded rooms with 
lack of privacy are the result. In all these matters 
and countless more the mother finds herself only an 
element in the community. Sometimes by a supreme 
effort she is able to surmount some of these difficul- 
ties, but in the end she finds that she is dependent 
upon an interplay of the family life with that of the 
community as a whole. 

Our community life at present is dominated by in- 
dustrial forces. If the importance of the relation 
of the family to the community were deeply under- 
stood and all the families together realized their in- 
terdependence and their common life, we should 
have a community operated with the interests of fam- 

47 


48 CONCERNING PARENTS 


ily life as its primary concern. Any economic and 
industrial system which has in it elements of danger 
to child life or a tendency to thwart the group life 
of the family is inimical to the future. 

When I was asked recently to speak at a meeting 
of radical young people, I said I would be delighted 
if I could choose the subject. ‘What is your sub- 
ject?” they asked. “The Nursery School—the Sub- 
cellar of the Revolution!” The nursery school and 
all that we are learning about the life of the child 
in the family really does mean a change in our 
thought concerning the whole structure of our social 
life. 

Mary Kincspury SIMKHOVITCH, 
Director, Greenwich House. 


THE NURSERY SCHOOL: A RESPONSE 
TO NEW NEEDS 


By Heten T. Woo.tey, Pu.D. 


Assistant Director of Merrill-Palmer School, Detroit 


A NuRSERY school is a social organization that 
has many aspects. Let us consider it first from the 
point of view of the need of young children for edu- 
cation; second, from the point of view of the mother 
and her relationship to her children; third, from the 
point of view of the home; and fourth, from the 
point of view of the system of education at large. 

The period of early childhood is an exceedingly 
important one, and we are just waking up to its im- 
portance. Hitherto, as we all know, little children 
have been left in their own homes, full time, up to 
the age of five years, and we have felt very strongly 
the wisdom of this plan. We have not been alto- 
gether satisfied with the result. Every kindergarten 
teacher knows how many children enter school with 
various types of defect which seem to indicate that 
the home had not been doing as good a job as it 
might in providing either for the physical welfare or 
for the training and education of children up to the 
age of five. 

How skilled a job is it to provide a really ideal 

49 


50 CONCERNING PARENTS 


background for the physical development of young 
children, for their mental development, and for their 
social development? The more I know about it, the 
more highly specialized and scientific a task it seems. 
The average mother is not in a position, unaided, to 
bring to bear upon her young children the knowledge 
we already have with regard to desirable modes of 
training and treatment “and education. No one has 
prepared her for this function, nor does any agency 
step forward to help. 

Our experimental nursery school has afforded us 
an opportunity for testing the results of unaided 
home care of young children. For the last four 
years we have had, in our school, children from a 
variety of homes, most of them somewhat above, 
rather than below the community average in eco- 
nomic status, intelligence, and education. These 
children were tested and measured in a variety of 
ways on entering the school, and again from time 
to time afterward. The school began furnishing cer- 
tain services, and advising with the parents about 
home care. The results of such supplementing of - 
home care were judged by the measurable progress 
of the children in physical growth, mental develop- 
ment, and behavior. 

In supplementing physical care the Merrill-Palmer 
School has provided very adequate medical examina- 
tions, including laboratory tests and the constant 
service of a nutrition expert, who not only plans the 
main meal of the day for the children at school, but 


THE NURSERY SCHOOL SI 


who advises with the mothers constantly about their 
home feeding, and obtains from them frequent rec- 
ords as to what food actually is given at home. Phy- 
sical progress is checked by careful monthly weigh- 
ing and measuring, by repeated laboratory tests to 
see if undesirable conditions are being corrected, and 
by repeated physical examinations, 

One might suppose that children with intelligent 
mothers, from homes somewhat above the average, 
were receiving adequate physical care, and yet we 
find that these children in our nursery school are 
growing at considerably more than the expected rate 
for their ages. When we plot the curve of growth 
for our children and compare it with the standard, 
we find that at the start they conform very well to 
the standards of measurement furnished us by the 
Children’s Bureau, but by the time they are five years 
old and ready to leave us, they are very decidedly 
above the standard. The nursery school has appar- 
ently been able to assist the home to bring about a 
better result in terms of physical growth and devel- 
opment. Not only measurements of growth, but the 
correction of the common minor defects of child- 
hood indicate the improved physical condition. 
Most of our children are constipated when they come 
to us. Some of them are more or less anemic. 
These conditions we can correct through scientific 
diet and through the advice that we can give to the 
mother about the home care of the child, provided we 
have the child long enough under our care. 


52 CONCERNING PARENTS 


How about the mental development of the chil- 
dren in the nursery school? Young children are 
learning many things with great rapidity and with 
great interest. They are learning motor coordina- 
tion, how to manage their bodies. They are learning 
the properties of the objects in the world about them. 
They are constantly exploring and testing and ex- 
perimenting with things, finding out what they are, 
what they will do, and how to use them. They are 
acquiring vocabulary, language, means of expression, 
and they may, if they get a chance, be learning a 
great deal about music and pictures, and taking the 
first step in producing some music and some pictures 
of their own. Here is a wide range of learning go- 
ing on, but who is guiding it? Are we setting the 
stage for learning? Is the unaided home at present 
furnishing an adequate background for the mental 
development of young children? 

In his very interesting and excellent book, “The 
Normal Mind,” Dr. William H. Burnham says that 
the most central thing in securing a wholesome men- 
tal state for any human being is a task suited to his 
age and stage of development, something for him to 
do which is interesting and absorbing, which calls 
forth effort and keeps him busy. 

To keep a pre-school child legitimately and profit- 
ably busy is, for the unaided mother in the home, 
not at all an easy task. It involves more knowledge 
of stages of development than most mothers possess. 
One sees even the intelligent mother making most 


THE NURSERY SCHOOL 53 


unreasonable demands of children, asking entirely 
too little in some directions and entirely too much in 
other directions, just because she does not know what 
their capacities are. She is not intending to be un- 
reasonable, but she has never studied the mental 
development of young childhood. To know the ca- 
pacities of little children at various stages requires 
something of an expert. One cannot expect every 
mother to be an expert in educational methods for 
children between two and five, any more than we 
expect every mother to be an educational expert in 
methods for children between five and ten years of 
age. In fact, at present the younger period is rather 
the more difficult, because it is not so well understood 
and not so well standardized as educational work for 
older children. 

It is a fascinating project to find out how much 
little children can do. For instance, a graduate stu- 
dent recently collected a thousand or more works of 
art, spontaneously produced by the nursery school 
children. All she did to stimulate their production 
was to furnish an easel of suitable height and draw- 
ing materials, either crayons or water-color paints in 
little jars, with large brushes. The only suggestion 
ever made was to say toa child, “Would you like to 
make a picture?” If he would, he proceeded to do it. 
When he got through, she asked him what he had 
made. Sometimes he knew and sometimes he didn’t, 
In any case she recorded exactly what he said. 

She found an interesting progression. The two- 


54 CONCERNING PARENTS 


year-old is interested just in using the materials. He 
likes to see the marks come on the paper and to find 
out what those crayons and brushes will do. He 
finds it a fascinating job just to scribble. His scrib- 
blings are round and round scribbles, or up and down 
scribbles. If you ask him what he has made, he 
has no answer and doesn’t seem to consider it a par- 
ticularly sensible question for you to ask. It is per- 
fectly obvious what he has made, and he is quite 
contented with it. A child somewhat older becomes 
more complicated in his scribbling, and suddenly it 
occurs to him that what he has scribbled looks like 
something. In some surprise, he says, ‘““‘Why, see, 
I have made a flower,” and he is particularly pleased 
with himself for having made a flower. Then he 
gets the idea that perhaps he could start out ahead of 
time to make something, and in the four-year-old 
period, we find that he knows ahead of time what he 
is going to make and produces at times pictures that 
are quite recognizable to the adult. 

Painting constitutes just one of the possible direc- 
tions of development of childish capacity in matters 
esthetic. Music is another exceedingly important 
one. Little children love music and respond to it 
most enthusiastically, from a year and a half, or 
even less. 

We are also studying their hand-work, their work 
with tools, their story-telling. We are making a col- 
lection of the spontaneous stories that these children 


THE NURSERY SCHOOL 55 


tell for one another’s entertainment. All of these 
aspects of their existence mean a great deal of mental 
activity for the child and a great deal of learning. 
Their learning needs to have an intelligently planned 
environment and some wise person who knows how 
to do just the right amount, but not too much, super- 
vising and suggesting. This is the function of the 
nursery school teacher. 

We have, in mental tests, a rough way of finding 
out how much the children are really profiting in- 
tellectually by a nursery school régime. We have 
taken two series of repeated mental tests in connec- 
tion with the school, one of the children in the school 
and the other of children on our large waiting list. 
As far as we know, the children on the waiting list 
are no different in kind from those in the school; it 
is merely lack of space that has kept them out, In 
comparing the tests and retests of the two series we 
find that the intelligence quotients of the children in 
the school are going up at a spectacular rate as com- 
pared with the children on the waiting list. 

It is not possible here to discuss all the scientific 
implications of this result. It is not as startling a 
fact as it may appear to be, but it does furnish a 
proof that the children in the school are profiting 
intellectually by the opportunity we have given them. 
They are better able to do intelligence tests after 
having had a period of experience in the school than 
they were before. I think it means that they are 


56 CONCERNING PARENTS 


laying a better foundation for mental growth and 
development later on than they would if they had 
not had this early opportunity. 

I have discussed two aspects of our experience 
with nursery school children that are measurable. 
We can measure their physical growth and we can, to 
some extent, measure their mental growth. The third 
aspect we are not able to measure. It is their social 
growth and development, and I consider that the 
most important of the three. 

We used to say that children under five had no 
group interest, that they were inclined to be solitary, 
and that their social relationship under that age was 
naturally with adults rather than with other children. 
I do not find it true of the children in the nursery 
school. I do find it true that the two-year-old chil- 
dren are more solitary in their play than the older 
ones; each two-year-old is apt to go and get some- 
thing that he wants to play with and play by himself. 
But he plays with an eye upon his neighbor, and he 
gets interest and stimulus out of what his neighbor is 
doing. 

Consider the play of two-year-olds with dolls. It 
is a very simple affair, wrapping dolly up in any 
available bit of cloth, putting dolly to bed in any 
convenient spot with a bit of cloth for a cover, rock- 
ing her or carrying her about. Each two-year-old 
plays with his own doll, but he plays with an eye 
upon his neighbor and his doll. He sees what his 
neighbor is doing with his doll and gets suggestions 


THE NURSERY SCHOOL 57 


from it. He maintains his play longer because some- 
body else is also playing with a doll, and he gets 
more interest and stimulus from it. It is a distinctly 
more social situation than that of a child playing 
entirely by himself. By the age of three children 
begin to enter spontaneously and very definitely into 
group activities, not very long maintained nor very 
systematically carried out, but distinctly cooperative 
in nature. By the age of four children are capable 
of complicated and sustained play in which there is 
group organization and leadership and community 
planning of a project. 

A great many children are brought to the nursery 
school whose mothers are concerned about certain 
phases of their social development. The child is too 
nervous, he is too shy, he is too domineering, he has 
temper tantrums, he cries too easily, he is not en- 
tirely truthful, he is too self-conscious, he is con- 
trary. We find that the group situation of the nurs- 
ery school is a powerful aid in helping to correct 
these tendencies. To illustrate the point I shall take 
two instances in which the mother was a college 
trained woman of intelligence as well as of education, 
devoted to her children, and yet finding herself with 
serious problems on her hands by the time the child 
was two or three years old. 

The first mother came with a three-year-old child 
that she said was highly nervous. She was doubtful 
whether he should be entered in the school at all. 
I told her to ask her doctor if he advised trying the 


58 CONCERNING PARENTS 


child in the school. If so, we would take him, see 
how he reacted, and report. The doctor advised 
trying the experiment. 

The child was in a sense no trouble in the school. 
He was too apathetic to be troublesome. What he 
did was simply sit around and wait to be waited 
upon, and look utterly bored. I didn’t know a three- 
year-old could look so bored. If you put a spoon 
into his hand, he just sat there with it in his hand. 
He didn’t care whether he got any food or not. If 
somebody came along and manipulated the spoon for 
him, he would probably eat the food or some of it. 
Most of the day he sat around watching the other 
children and looking bored. 

His behavior at home was very different. At 
home, he was capable of having the most violent 
temper-tantrums, in which he screamed so that he 
disturbed the whole neighborhood, and until he re- 
duced his family to a state of obedience and compli- 
ance with his wishes. 

Never once did that child have a temper-tantrum 
at school. Our problem was entirely that of break- 
ing through his shell of apathy, by finding something 
which would arouse his interest. We did not do 
much except expose him to the group, let him see 
what they were doing, and come forth and claim his 
share when he was ready. It is a most important 
point, not to try to force a situation with a child 
of this age. We had a long wait in this case, but 
in the end he found that the constructive work and 


THE NURSERY SCHOOL 59 


play of the school was even more fascinating than 
his favorite project of dominating his mother in 
temper-tantrums. : 

Before he left the school he was a perfectly 
satisfactory youngster both at home and at school. 
His constructive handwork with tools was particu- 
larly good. Just before he was five, he made a little 
engine and train of cars that was quite recog- 
nizable. He had to have some help with it, but most 
of the sawing and hammering and putting together 
he did himself and was very proud of it. Needless 
to say, this result could not have been obtained with- 
out excellent cooperation from the mother. We 
worked together, she in the home, and we in the 
school. We found her entirely willing to consider 
the whole problem dispassionately and to modify the 
home régime. This child is now about eight years 
old. Last summer he went to a little boys’ camp, and 
to our great joy he took the prize as the best all- 
around camper. When I think of what he was when 
he entered the nursery school, I can hardly believe it. 

The second problem was that of a two-year-old 
who was so energetic that nobody could live with 
him. He just disrupted the household. He would 
not let anything alone. His father was loudest in 
his complaints about him. The mother and father 
in despair came to see me. They said if we did not: 
take him and do something, they were sure he was: 
headed straight for perdition. They had exhausted 
all their resources. The child was not amenable to 


60 CONCERNING PARENTS 


discipline. He didn’t care how much he was 
spanked. He just went ahead and had as much fun 
as he could in spite of the spankings. His father, 
who was a military gentleman with great notions of 
military discipline, was at the end of his rope. He 
had spanked as much as he dared, with no effect, and 
what could a poor military gentleman do next? 
When he described some of the young gentleman’s 
misdemeanors to me, he said, ““You know, we have 
nice things at home, nice dishes and nice table linen, 
and he just won’t take any care of them at all. He 
gets his hand into the gravy and lays it right on the 
clean tablecloth, and does it after I have told him 
not to.” 

We accepted the boy in the school, and he was a 
handful, there is no doubt about that. His chief de- 
light when he entered, at two years one month, was 
knocking the babies down and pulling hair. The sat- 
isfaction he got out of seeing them topple over and 
hearing them cry is indescribable. Of course, we had 
to try to defend the other children, but in Miss Hen- 
ton’s treatment of John there was nothing that 
you would recognize as punishment, simply patient, 
persistent statement of the case. Every time he 
transgressed, or tried to, she took him aside and told 
him about it, simply explained firmly that his be- 
havior wouldn’t do, that he hurt the children, that 
he couldn’t pull hair. On one occasion, she did some- 
thing more dramatic. He reached his hand out to 
pull the hair of the next child and she very deftly got 


THE NURSERY SCHOOL 61 


his hand into his own hair instead, so that he gave 
himself the pull and was quite astonished at the re- 
sult. Gradually one could see John get control of 
himself. He would reach out his hand to pull, and 
then withdraw it and put it behind his back. 

That child, after three months in the school, gave 
us an illustration of thoughtfulness for others that 
we thought remarkable. The children go to lie down 
for a little while before luncheon, and Miss Henton, 
who was feeling tired that day, lay down, too, on 
one of the cots, but she had to look around the room 
to keep track of what was going on. She was lying 
there vainly attempting to relax and at the same time 
hold her head up with her hand to see about the 
room, when John saw her. He took a blanket, folded 
it up and came and put it under Miss Henton’s head. 
He saw that it was still not quite high enough, and 
went and got a second one. His action was entirely 
without suggestion from any one—just his own 
spontaneous notion of how he could be helpful. 

I do not mean to say that the problem is com- 
pletely solved with John, but I do mean to say that 
his parents see a different method of discipline, and 
that he has become so much more social in attitude 
than he was at the start, that the problem is a totally 
different and a much more hopeful one. 

Thus we have seen that a well managed nursery 
school can be of profit to children of this age, phys- 
ically, mentally and socially. Sometimes they are 
themselves able to sum it up. We had one child at 


62 CONCERNING PARENTS 


two and a half whose mother had the theory that 
she must establish a habit of obedience, which meant 
trying to force the child to do absolutely everything 
she said, with the usual result of rebellion and con- 
trariness. She went through a fearfully contrary 
stage, and had been spanked a great deal before we 
could persuade her mother that it really wasn’t worth 
while to insist upon demands unless they were im- 
portant. This child also suffered considerably from 
constipation when she first came to us, and that had 
to be straightened out. After about a year in the 
school, at the age of three and a half, she looked 
at her mother very reflectively one day and said, 
“Mother, you know, you haven’t had to give me an 
enema or a spanking for a long time.” 

But what a nursery school may do for a child is 
not the whole story. There is also the question of 
the way in which attending a nursery school modi- 
fies the child’s relation to his mother. I am willing 
to concede absolutely that the most important single 
element in the mental welfare of a little child is the 
parent-child relationship,—the child’s emotional re- 
lationship to his mother and father, the affection 
that he gets from them, the feeling of continuity 
and support and dependence upon them. But I do 
not agree that an ideal parent-child relationship is 
best maintained by having the mother and the child 
together all of the twenty-four hours a day up to 
five years of age. That I do not believe, because I 
see so many difficulties which grow out of the unre- 


THE NURSERY SCHOOL 63 


lieved companionship of mother and child, which are 
avoidable when a reasonable amount of separation 
is provided, as under nursery school conditions. I 
have tried the complete twenty-four-hour care of my 
own child, so I am speaking from inside experience 
on that point. If you have the complete and unre- 
lieved responsibility of a little child you are almost 
sure to fall into one or another of the common emo- 
tional pitfalls of parenthood,—and there are some 
very real pitfalls. If you are very conscientious and 
rather executive in type, you are apt to do entirely 
too much bossing and dominating. You seé so many 
things you want to accomplish with the child, and 
you are so sure they are the right things, that you 
just can’t keep from hammering away at him all the 
time, with the result that you either destroy his ini- 
tiative or set him off in hopeless opposition to your- 
self. If you are the emotional type, you like to feel 
the child’s dependence upon you. So many mothers 
love the baby stage and find it an almost insurmount- 
able temptation to prolong it as long as possible. As 
a result, the child is not happy out of the mother’s 
presence, and it gets into a thoroughly unwholesome 
atmosphere of constantly begging for petting and 
attention and not being happy without it. We all 
concede that this is unwholesome, and yet it is not 
easy to avoid if you are of that type and have com- 
plete and unrelieved contact with the child. 

It is not easy for some mothers to avoid being 
over-solicitous. If you happen to be of a somewhat 


64 CONCERNING PARENTS 


nervous and fearful type, you see all the dreadful 
things that might happen to children and are con- 
stantly trying to avoid them. I remember one par- 
ticularly who had been a doctor’s assistant and who 
knew all the terrible things that might happen to a 
child. I believe that child was nearer a nervous 
wreck when she entered the school at three years than — 
any we have ever had. She was fairly trembling 
with anxiety all the time, while her mother was un- 
conscious of the reason for it, conscientious and de- 
voted as she undoubtedly was. 

These are very real difficulties. They do not de- 
pend upon the intelligence of the mother. They de- 
pend upon her own emotional type, of which she 
probably has not complete control,—very few of us 
have. The amount of separation of mother and child 
involved in attendance at a nursery school usually, 
we find, improves the emotional relationship between 
mother and child, and enhances its value. 

A good deal has been said about the mother’s right 
to have some life of her own, connecting her with 
the community, and independent of the home. The 
need is, I think, a very real one under modern con- 
ditions. I doubt very much if any mother can be 
a good mother who does not have some vital contacts 
outside of the home, but I wonder if the same is not 
true of the children. It means as much to a child 
to have his own life as it does to the mother to have 
hers. 

Suppose, then, we turn to the more general topic 


THE NURSERY SCHOOL 65 


of the home and the needs of the home. We can- 
not discuss fully the subject of mother and child 
without at once considering the home as a whole. 
No doubt we would all agree that the essential part 
of a home, what makes it a good home, is its at- 
mosphere; the emotional relationship among its mem- 
bers. A good home is a place where the various 
members of the family find support and comfort and 
affection and stimulation. Now, is the ideal atmos- 
phere best attained by a process of inbreeding in 
which mother and child remain entirely in the home, 
or is it best maintained by giving each of them some 
outside interests? JI think the latter. Mother and 
child, when each has his or her own outside interests, 
come back together in a better position to appreciate 
each other; mother becomes a little more of a treat, 
and so does the child. Neither sinks into the posi- 
tion of being merely a constant part of the family 
background. 

The same rule holds true of the relationship of 
younger and older children. In one family there 
were twin boys and a child just younger, a little sis- 
ter. They were very active, superior children who 
were exceedingly hard to manage under the condi- 
tions of the modern home in an apartment. The 
twins were constantly tormenting little sister, getting 
jealous of her and surreptitiously biting and slap- 
ping her, partly because they did not have enough 
systematic occupation. Perhaps the mother ought 
to have been able to avoid that, but it is not easy 


66 CONCERNING PARENTS 


under the restricted conditions of a city apartnient. 
Having the twins in the nursery school changed the 
whole relationship. They began to see how very in- 
teresting and attractive little sister was when they 
got home to her in the afternoon, and most of the 
baiting of little sister stopped. 

In discussing human relationships we sometimes 
do not put stress enough on the value of friends as 
distinct from the value of family relationships. Chil- 
dren need their friends,—friends of their own age,— 
even when they are only three and four years old. 
Children’s friendships should be fostered by the 
home and recognized as filling a legitimate need. 
They get an essential stimulus to mental and social 
development out of contact with their own age 
groups that cannot be furnished by contact with very 
different ages. They need. both things. Little chil- 
dren need their own social group and their common 
interests of three- and four-year-olds, and they need, 
too, their family relationships with mother and fa- 
ther, brothers and sisters. These are not at all mu- 
tually exclusive relationships; they should reénforce 
and supplement one another. They are two needs, 
both of which are necessary for a thoroughly whole- 
some mental attitude toward life at any age, and 
should be recognized and provided for as such. 

The last aspect of this topic is the possible func- 
tion of a nursery school in an educational system. 
There has been a good deal of discussion about who 
is to blame for the fact that so many children are 


THE NURSERY SCHOOL 67 


badly brought up. The consensus seems to be that 
it is the parents; that the home ought to be doing 
more than it is to furnish adequate training for the 
children. The queer thing is that we seem to think 
we have gone a long way toward a solution when 
we state that parents are to blame. Let us grant 
that the parents are at fault. But who are the par- 
ents? They are grown-up children. Are we going 
to make them better parents by just telling them that 
they are bad parents? There must be some other ap- 
proach to the problem. There must be some way of 
training a better set of parents than we have at pres- 
ent if the situation is to be remedied. The problem 
is one of providing a new type of education. 

The nursery school can never remove the need for 
better educated parents. But it may become one 
agency for educating parents, and a very efficient 
one. It is so already for the parents of the children 
now in school. We need, in addition, pre-parental 
education; the kind of teaching which would make 
young people understand the needs and capacities of 
children better than they do now. Nowhere in our © 
present system is education for parenthood ade- 
quately provided for. I do not mean to ignore the 
valiant attempts that have been made to do this, 
but they have not as yet modified the system of edu- 
cation as a whole, though they may have pointed the 
way. 

Instruction for future parenthood is difficult be- 
cause it is hard to talk to young people about the 


68 CONCERNING PARENTS 


care and management of children before they are in 
any way faced with the problem. It becomes then 
abstract discussion and does not register in usable 
form. Many educators argue that we must wait 
until young people are parents before they are ready 
to accept instruction. 

We are finding that the nursery school offers a 
laboratory which can be used to vitalize instruction 
in child care. In our own institution, our chief pur- 
pose, according to the terms of our foundation, is 
that of educating girls and young women in the care 
and management of children. Our students are col- 
lege graduates and undergraduates from many parts 
of the country who come to us to study children in 
all the phases of their development. The nursery 
school becomes their laboratory. 

Under these conditions, I have found no difficulty 
whatever in arousing a vivid interest in child care on 
the part of our students. They really get interested 
in children, and they learn a lot about them. Each 
of our students adopts two children in the nursery 
school, of whom she makes personality studies which 
cover their physical condition, their mental condition, 
their social background, and their reaction under 
nursery school conditions. It is interesting to see 
how rapidly these students begin to assume a ma- 
ternal attitude toward their special children. They 
find those two children more alluring and interest- 
ing than the others in the school, and they don’t 
quite understand why everybody else doesn’t, too. 


THE NURSERY SCHOOL 69 


They begin to find the usual maternal excuses and 
explanations for the things which the children do, 
that are not approved of. In the end, these girls ac- 
quire really usable information about, and whole- 
some attitudes toward little children. 

This use of the nursery school can be generalized. 
It does not seem to me that we need concern our- 
selves in the least as to whether the students in such 
a school are ever going to be parents or not. Some 
of them will be and some of them will not be, but 
the problem is wider than that. The problem is one 
of greater community intelligence about little chil- 
dren. Often an interested auntie can do a great deal, 
if she knows enough, to modify the conditions under 
which a small child lives. As a matter of fact, most 
women who enter the professional world go into 
some phase of work related to children. If they do 
not marry and have children of their own, they are 
apt to become teachers or social workers or nurses. 

Young men ought to have the same type of op- 
portunity because it is almost as important to have 
them intelligent about children and their stages of de- 
velopment, and about methods of managing them, 
as it is women, and there is no reason why they 
shouldn’t be as much interested. Sometimes they 
are. Often they are just as skillful. I know many 
a family in which it is the father who has far more 
native intelligence about the training of the children 
than the mother. That is a matter of personality 
rather than of sex. I can see no reason why the type 


oe 


70 CONCERNING PARENTS 


of educational opportunity which offers a study of 
childhood should not be thrown open to students of 
both sexes. In time the result ought to be to raise 
the level of community understanding of children. 
This is what we need in order to better care for 
them, from babyhood on. 


GETTING AWAY FROM THE FAMILY: THE 
ADOLESCENT AND HIS LIFE PLANS 


By Leta S. HoLitincwortH, PH.D. 


Associate Professor of Education, Teachers College, 
Columbia University 


THERE is a psychological urge which develops in 
every normal human being in the years between 
twelve and twenty to get away from family super- 
vision and to become an independent person. We 
might call this process psychological weaning. Like 
the physical weaning from infantile methods of tak- 
ing food, it may be attended by emotional outbursts, 
which are likely to come upon people whenever habits 
have to be broken. In both kinds of weaning, we 
have a situation in which habits appropriate to a 
given stage of development come into conflict with 
the urges growing out of further development of the 
organism. Also in either the physical or the mental 
weaning, at least two separate sets of habits must 
be superseded, the habits of the parent and the habits 
of the offspring. In mental weaning, indeed, more 
than two sets may be involved. There are the habits 
of the child, of the mother, of the father, and often 
of older brothers and sisters, or even of aunts. and 
uncles, all having the possibility of acting in oppo- 

71 


72 CONCERNING PARENTS 


sition to the new attitudes which must come when 
childish things are to be put away. 

The process of getting away from the family thus 
stands double, triple and even quadruple chances of 
being painfully and imperfectly carried out. The 
technique of weaning, and especially of mental wean~- 
ing, deserves study by all parents who desire the wel- 
fare of their children instead of their own emotional 
indulgence. 

By getting away from the family I do not mean 
the mere circumstance of leaving the parental roof, 
although in most cases that is automatically involved. 
There are persons who have fully accomplished their 
psychological weaning who continue to reside in the 
parental house; and, on the other hand, there are 
those who live far removed from it in space who 
have never freed their minds from childish depend- 
ence upon parents or from childish obedience to them, 
and who are always expecting the world at large to 
protect them as parents protected them in the home. 

Also, by emancipation from the parents, I do not 
mean disorderly conduct, defiance of authority, or 
insolence. Some of the most unweaned of ado- 
lescents are the most insolent, disorderly, and trou- 
blesome. They behave like infants indeed, infants 
weighing more than a hundred pounds, and grown 
to be five or six feet tall. Such adolescents, however 
insubordinate in conduct, are not emotionally eman- 
cipated in the sense in which we are using the word. 
On the contrary, they are usually bound to the pa- 


GETTING AWAY FROM THE FAMILY 73 


rental resources in all essential respects. They are 
not on the way to the kind of maturity of which we 
are speaking here. 

By getting away from the family, I mean a de- 
tachment from it in the emotional life to such an 
extent at least that there shall remain no crippling 
bondage to interfere with legitimate personal choice 
and achievement of what counts most for adult hap- 
piness, vocation, mating and attitude toward life. 

The individual, by the time he or she is twenty, 
must have left home in his feelings. He must have 
broken the habits of obedience, dependence, pro- 
tectedness and the like which are likely to be fos- 
tered by the immaturity of childhood and be ready 
to face the world as an independent entity. 

It is evident that as men have become more and 
more civilized, the problems of adolescent adjust- 
ment have become more and more complicated. In 
primitive life there was no question of the mother’s 
apron strings, not only because apron strings had not 
at that time been invented, but because release from 
the family situation was then accomplished by for- 
mal public action. Then, as now, the mothers wept 
and other relatives also, but the primitive community 
required that hunters and fighters begin their life- 
work early. These public needs grew gradually less 
pressing as men gained more and more control over 
the earth. Wealth and security accumulated, and the 
ancient tribal ceremonies of puberty fell into disuse. 
We now leave it to the adolescent to disconnect him- 


74 CONCERNING PARENTS 


self or herself from emotional and economic de- 
pendence upon the family. 

While the putting away of childish things is neces- 
sary for carrying into effect normal life plans, it is 
nearly always somewhat painful, and many persons 
never accomplish it at all, They then remain home- 
sick all their lives. The homesick individual is ill 
of a psychological illness which incapacitates for the 
activities of adult life. 

One of the facts earliest appreciated in the modern 
study of ineffectual personality was that the inca- 
pacity for adjustment is often connected with ab- 
normal persistence of attachment to the family situ- 
ation. Habits of invariable yielding to parental 
domination, or habits of being tenderly sustained and 
protected without facing competitive work, have 
never been broken. 

These attachments to protective parents, this sub- 
mission to dominating parents, the comfort of food 
and shelter secured without effort, ideas of filial duty 
—all develop strongly in the long, impressionable 
period through which they operate. 

Now, it will be asked, how can parents work to- 
ward the normal, healthy mental weaning of their 
children? What techniques may they employ? It is 
hard for parents to lead up to the right outcome in 
this matter, unless they keep themselves actively con- 
scious of its imminence and importance; unless they 
have foresight, insight, and self-control. 

One of these requirements, insight, can come from 


GETTING AWAY FROM THE FAMILY 75 


the study of the psychology of childhood and ado- 
lescence. The growing of a child is so gradual, and 
habits of acting toward a child become so firmly 
fixed, that the parent is liable to fall victim to his 
own habits unless he or she revise them constantly 
in the light of developmental psychology. The clutch 
of habit is nowhere more powerful than in the par- 
ent-child relationship. Parents begin when the child 
is born to help or to hinder normal adolescent eman-.- 
cipation from them, by the way they treat the child 
in revising both his and their habits as development 
progresses. 

The foundations of a successful adolescence must 
be laid in childhood. Will the child withstand home- 
sickness when he is eighteen? It depends on the de- 
gree to which parents have fostered self-reliance and 
progressive attitudes in him from early childhood. 
It depends on whether the parents have acted as 
though the child belonged to them, or have acted 
as though he belonged to himself and to his genera- 
tion. 

One may ask, but how can a child of three or 
four years be self-reliant? How can a six-year-old 
depend upon himself? Consider a few examples 
from real life. A boy of three and a half years is 
still nursing from a bottle because his parents say 
it was hard for him to learn to drink from a cup. 
Another is unable to walk along the street without 
holding on to some one’s hand. Here is a child of 
six years unable to sleep in a bed by himself. There 


76 CONCERNING PARENTS 


is one of five years yelling and falling into a tantrum 
if his mother goes out and leaves him at home. His 
mother always slips out a side door secretly on the 
rare occasions when she leaves him, to avoid these 
scenes. She never faces the situation with him. 

All these young children seem to the psychologist 
well launched before school age on the way to diffi- 
cult adolescence. The mental histories of homesick 
adolescents and adults are replete with similar inci- 
dents. The seven-year-old of normal intelligence 
who cannot dress himself, who permits himself to 
be fed by his nurse at table, who cannot go to sleep 
alone at night, is, no doubt, well on the way toward 
chronic homesickness. 

This problem of throwing off infantile dependency 
is especially hard, it seems, with only children, with 
youngest children, with physically delicate children, 
and with girls. Also, the difficulties arise quite 
largely from the possessive attitudes taken by moth- 
ers. 

Let us glance for a moment at the unfortunately 
conspicuous part which we find mothers playing in 
the histories of the homesick. The father does not 
usually cling with such tenacity to his maturing chil- 
dren, but in many cases the mother holds on as long 
as she possibly can. We have thousands of mother- 
in-law jokes, but hardly any father-in-law jokes. 

This difference in behavior we can readily com- 
prehend if we reflect upon the life of the typical 
mother, or at any rate of the typical mother of the 


GETTING AWAY FROM THE FAMILY 77. 


past, whose children, let us say, are now adolescent. 
She has accepted as her life task the rearing of chil- 
dren. It is understood by her to be her career. She 
is led by all the pressures of society to think of her- 
self in this as a lifelong role. But no one has pointed 
out to her, and it has not occurred to her, that this 
is a life-task only if child-bearing goes on, as long 
as it used to, until the age of about forty-five years. 
If mothers bear children after they are forty, it will 
be true that they can occupy themselves until old age 
in what is conceived to be a life work. 

But in modern life only a few children are born, 
and the mother is likely to have all, or shall we say 
both, of her children in adolescence by the time she 
is forty-five years old. Still strong, energetic, and 
prime for a task, she sees what she had been told is 
her job slipping automatically, as a function of nor- 
mal growth, out of her hands. The finished prod- 
uct, her adolescent children, are trying to leave her 
jurisdiction. Without reflection or without analysis 
of what is happening, she grasps at her disappearing 
career. She takes as firm a grip as she can in trying 
to hold on. 

If the father saw his banking business, or his 
medical practice, or his seat in Congress, or his gro- 
cery store leaving him in a similar manner, he would 
hold on anxiously and grimly, too. You have seen 
it happen. The behavior of mothers is only to be 
expected from our general knowledge of the psychol- 
ogy of habit formation. The importance of the ac- 


78 CONCERNING PARENTS 


customed task in middle life can scarcely be over- 
estimated, in the mental hygiene of human beings. 
Nobody wants a future empty of its familiar, inter- 
esting task, and so the funny and bitterly pathetic 
mother-in-law joke multiplies. 

To cite just one concrete instance of homesick- 
ness from the hundreds which are met in real life: 
A boy was referred for psychological examination 
at the age of nineteen years, because his education 
was being seriously interfered with by chronic home- 
sickness. The school history was as follows: at the 
usual age, he started to elementary school in the 
small town where his parents lived. He did well 
there and was graduated in due course. Then, in 
accordance with the family tradition, at the age of 
fourteen, he was sent away by the father to a New 
England preparatory school to be made ready for 
college. He remained there for two weeks, during 
which time he wept much, could not eat, could not 
study, and begged to be sent home. His mother in- 
sisted on bringing him back, which was done, and he 
attended the public high school in the home town 
until he was graduated from it. During all this time, 
there was a difference of opinion between the parents 
as to the course to be pursued, the father believing 
that he should have been forced to stay at the prepar- 
atory school away from home. 

After graduation from high school, the problem 
again arose. There was no college in the home town, 
fortunately. The boy, then aged eighteen, was sent 


. GETTING AWAY FROM THE FAMILY 79 


to an Eastern college where he was miserable, made 
no friends, lost ten pounds, could not study, occu- 
pied himself in trying to conceal his weeping, and 
wrote home that the food at the college was terrible, 
that his digestion was being ruined, and finally that 
his heart was becoming weak. 

He developed physical complaints rapidly, and at 
last, before the Christmas holidays, had to be sent 
home. There his mother received him with satis- 
faction, coddled him, waited upon him, and sug- 
gested that he might not be physically able to endure 
college education. The family physician, however, 
gave him a clean bill of health in all respects, so the 
father determined to try another college, compromis- 
ing this time by selecting one near enough to home 
so that the boy could visit frequently. Here, too, all 
sorts of difficulties developed. The boys in the dor- 
mitories were coarse and rude. The instructors were 
dry and uninteresting. A very bad cough had come 
on. 

At this time, the boy being now nineteen years 
old, the father perceived that the situation was be- 
coming dangerous and called for advice. The men- 
tal examination showed that this boy was of excel- 
lent quality intellectually, and fully capable of pursu- 
ing a college course, rating well above the average 
college senior in this respect. Intellectual incapac- 
ity, which may be the source of similar symptoms, 
was thus ruled out as the cause of his trouble. The 
family history as to achievement was good. No 


So CONCERNING PARENTS 


man among near relatives had failed to function oc- 
cupationally on the family level, which was in the 
professions. The boy had two sisters of whom there 
were no complaints. 

When the relationship between the parents and the 
boy was examined, it was revealed that the mother 
had always coddled him from infancy, had encour- 
aged him to remain in bed at the slightest illness, 
had read to him for years instead of requiring him 
to read for himself, and had clung emotionally to 
him throughout his life. At the age of nineteen 
years, she had not broken off the habit of tucking 
him in at night. She still called him her “precious 
lamb,” in public. ‘“‘So-and-so is mother’s beau,’’ she 
would say. “He doesn’t care for the other girls.” 
In every respect, childish attitudes had been encour- 
aged by the mother to persist. 

As a result, we had before us a typical “mamma’s 
boy,’ aged nineteen years. For instance, during the 
interviews held with him, he ate gumdrops like a 
- child and naively offered some ‘to the examiner. 
Even the gumdrop habit had not been broken. 
Never had he earned a cent in his life. “Mamma 
always gave me my allowance,” he said. He did not 
care for girls. He was afraid of them and disliked 
parties. The “mamma’s beau” idea seemed to have 
been successfully inculcated. He had developed a 
variety of doubts and anxieties concerning his pow- 
ers and his physical health. 

It was recommended that the boy get work for 











GETTING AWAY FROM THE FAMILY 81 


the summer, at some distance from home, earning 
money, preferably at some form of manual labor, to 
dissipate his fears about his heart, stomach, and 
practically every other vital organ that a person may 
have, and that he then be sent. West to a coeduca- 
tional college to complete his college work. These 
“suggestions were received with deep offense by the 
mother, but the father had all the recommendations 
carried out. The homesickness was gradually cured, 
in spite of the unfavorable circumstance that this 

case had been allowed to go on in this way for nearly 
twenty years. 

We have shown that getting away from the fam- 
ily is likely to involve a conflict between old habits 
and new urges. What are these new urges and how 
do they arise? They arise as functions of the ma- 
turing organism, chiefly as concerns the intellect, 
and as concerns sexual powers and interests. They 
have to do with the life plans of the individual in 
regard to mating, vocation, religious belief, and the 
general concept of the self. These urges cannot be- 
come strong until sex and intellect approach matur- 
ity, which is during adolescence. They grow, as or- 
'gans grow, especially the brain with its appendages 
_and the sexual organs. It is to carry out plans built 
upon these urges that the adolescent struggles for 
his freedom, against the pull of his own habits and 
those of his parents. 

The adolescent should be sympathetically encour- 
_aged to make a life plan, but in the knowledge that 


82 CONCERNING PARENTS 


this may shift somewhat as years advance and in the 
thought that it should be sufficiently flexible to ad- 
just to inevitable obstacles and conditions which can- 
not be foreseen. Above all, it is important that no 
impossible ideal of the self be fostered. Disharmony 
between an impossible ideal of the self and the actual 
potentialities of the person may lead to painful men- 
tal conflicts and to break-down. In furthering the 
psychological weaning of their offspring, parents 
should strive to estimate objectively the real capaci- 
ties of the latter, to avoid fostering impossible ideals. 

In order to foresee and guard against an uninten- 
tional clutching at their adolescent children in an ef- 
fort to prevent their normal departure, parents 
should begin early to cultivate interests extraneous 
to their children. Such interests will serve to occupy 
and balance them against the day of their children’s 
psychological weaning. The adolescent should 
neither be thrust forth suddenly from home nor be 
held in bondage to the home. The weaning should 
be gradual but complete. This achievement calls for 
patience and for insight on the part of parents, under 
the complicated conditions of our advanced civiliza- 
tion. : 


THE FAMILY AS COORDINATOR OF 
COMMUNITY FORCES 


By Ernest R. Groves, Pu.D. 


Professor of Social Science, Boston University 


SENTIMENT likes to think of the family as some- 
thing that does not change, and so we find whenever 
anybody considers home problems from the point of 
view of narrow personal experience, the temptation 
to think of the family in a static sense is always pres- 
ent. Of course, the reason is that we are always 
looking backward when we try to interpret our own 
family experience, particularly that part of our ex- 
perience that happened to us in our childhood. 

The facts of life care not for our attitude. The 
family never remains for any length of time the 
same. It is forever changing. It has been one of 
the most sensitive of our institutions. It is particu- 
larly sensitive at present, and is changing probably 
as rapidly as any part of our life. It can never be 
held in even its present form, so far as its surface 
functions are concerned, even though we try desper- 
ately to anchor it to something that appeals to us 
as particularly wholesome. It is played upon con- 
stantly by the other experiences of life and lives by 

83 


84. CONCERNING PARENTS 


its ability to adjust itself to those changing circum- 
stances. 

We at present are in the midst of all the difficul- 
ties that result from a changing family life, and 
some people are discouraged, some are almost hope- 
less, and some are so foolish as to try to force the 
family back to what it once was. Whether we like 
it or not, the family emerges from any attempt on 
the part of society or organization to hold it in its 
present standing or its past functioning, and the only 
thing left is for thoughtfulness to try to adjust the 
family not only to the present needs but also as far 
as possible to the tasks of the future. 

There is one thing we have to grant at once, when 
we try.to think of the family from this viewpoint. 
Never in the future can the family function so much 
as it has in the immediate past. In primitive society 
there have been times when it has not functioned so 
very greatly but in our childhood, and particularly 
the childhood of our parents, it had almost a monop- 
oly of certain kinds of social experiences that are 
being rapidly taken from it. It remains for us, 
therefore, to discover what the family can do, and 
do wisely, in the present. 

We must not force the family to do what it can 
not well do, but we find, when we study its possibili- 
ties, that there never was a time when it could func- 
tion to such great social advantage as at present, 
provided it has the strategy to see what it ought to 
do and the good sense not to try to do the things 


COORDINATOR OF COMMUNITY FORCES 85 


that are actually impossible for it. We shall have 
to look to the community more and more for things 
that once were family functions, but four fundamen- 
tal functions of family life remain. 

The first is the interpretation of experience. 
Every normal family provides for the child and also 
for the father and mother the best possible center 
for the bringing of the out-of-the-home experiences 
for reasonable and serious interpretation, and though 
we shall have to send our child out into life more 
and more to get things outside the home that once 
we gave him in the family life, we certainly still 
have that wonderful chance to have him come back 
to us with his experience and ask us, from time to 
time, how he can interpret it so as to get from it 
its largest meaning. 

This will require on our part that we do not try 
merely to bring him our experience but that we are 


_ ourselves constantly alive to the changing circum- 
_ stances, so that we can interpret to him his actual 
_ experience that he may feel that the home is the best 





place for understanding all the various influences 
that come into his life. 

In the second place, to some extent, to the largest 
extent so far as fundamentals are concerned, we 


_ have the power to direct the child. To be sure, this 


brings us risk. It does follow that at times we mis- 
direct him, but if we are thoughtful and serious, if 
we keep close to child life, we at least can be safely 
trusted with advising him in regard to the major 


86 CONCERNING PARENTS 


experiences of life. We can tell him where to go 
to find the experiences that we believe are best for 
him to get. We will not try to give them to him 
ourselves. We will realize that the expert can do 
better than we can do, but we can at least choose 
between experts. We will have to take the responsi- 
bility of direction or absolutely fail as parents. 

Then also it still remains to the family to be the 
most important place for stimulation, because it has 
the child to a very large extent in the early years 
and also in the periods and under the opportunities 
that provide the most lasting stimulation. 

Last of all, the child, being human, needs fellow- 
ship. Here also there is risk, but we all grant it is 
a human need, that a child feels poverty-stricken in 
his childhood and in his adult life feels as if he had 
been robbed of an essential experience, if fellowship 
be entirely denied him. This fellowship provides 
for the child much more than the kind of police- 
power control that thoughtless persons want the fam- 
ily to undertake so seriously. It provides the begin- 
ning of loyalty which is always a greater virtue than 
obedience and fits the child to take his own place and 
govern himself increasingly as his knowledge in- 
creases. 

And so the family in the future can be safely 
trusted with interpreting a large part of the experi- 
ences of life, with the directing of child life, with 
the giving of stimulation, and particularly with be- 
stowing upon the child the necessary fellowship. 


COORDINATOR OF COMMUNITY FORCES 87 


But we shall have to turn more and more to other 
institutions for the doing of things that once were 
done by the family, and the family has a right to 
demand of these institutions that they look at their 
work to some extent from the family viewpoint. 

The family represents the most human level of 
criticism, of interpretation. It is closer to the fun- 
damental impulses than any of the other institu- 
tions. It has a firmer grip upon human nature. It 
therefore may say to these institutions out in the 
community, “You may do the things that we once 
tried to do, because you are prepared to do them 
better than we are at present, but when you take 
them over, you must keep in mind always our point 
of view. You must criticize your work from the 
family attitude. You must demand that your suc- 
cesses be interpreted to some extent from the point 
of view of family welfare.” 

The first institution that: is constantly taking over 
from the family, and will no doubt take over more 
and more, is the school. What are the things that 
the family must have from the school if it is to have 
increased confidence in school training? It demands 
that the school somehow give to the child out-of- 
door freedom, because it has recognized from its 
own experience that very much of the excellent edu- 
cational advantages of family life in the past have 
come from the child’s freedom after school out in 
the world by himself, particularly in the rural en- 
vironment. It therefore says to the school, “You 


88 CONCERNING PARENTS 


can never succeed, however you try, if you don’t 
realize that the child’s life must have a large ele- 
ment of freedom, and that freedom must be out of 
doors.” The family questions very much if we 
have arrived yet at the point where we dare think 
of our school program as final. It is not clear at 
all that our school buildings and the things we do in 
them, are going to give us the results we demand. 
It may be that studies have taken only a small part 
of the child’s time; but as they come to take a larger 
part, it may appear that education must be differ- 
ent, it must have more freedom, and it must be more 
out of doors. 

The same is true with reference to self-discovery. 
The family is afraid of the expert because it feels 
he is likely to hasten things; that he may not have 
the patience, and the genius, to let the child alone a 
good part of the time. Education is doing too much 
for the child, and the expert is always in danger of 
doing too much. 

The family is very much afraid of the tendency 
of education to become mechanical and not allow 
for variation. The normal family demands varia- 
tion. The father and mother if they have any in- 
sight at all, always recognize differences in children; 
and just as soon as they come into contact with 
school life, they find that in spite of theory, in spite 
of good teaching, in spite of a philosophy which is 
quite contrary, a great part of our school activity 
is mechanical; that it is judged a success or a failure 


COORDINATOR OF COMMUNITY FORCES 89 


in terms of what actually are formal results; and 
that there is an enormous amount of standardizing 
and classifying. 

The trouble is not with the principles, but rather 
with the attitude of teachers. The teachers are 
more static, less progressive than the principles under 
which they operate. It is so easy, so natural to 
have that attitude of mind toward anything one does. 
It is so difficult to think of educational processes in 
terms of humanexperience. There is always the risk 
of haste, there is always the pressure of the ma- 
chinery, the control from above. It is natural in- 
deed, that the teacher, in spite of her profession, 
should always be in danger of having a static atti- 
tude when she actually deals with a child. 

In so far as she does that, with all her improved 
equipment and greater training, it will be found that 
a mischievous element will come from our schools 
to vex society, and therefore the family says to the 
school: “Until you make us feel that you can give 
more flexibility in your school processes, we will at 
least be suspicious as we turn the child over to you 
more and more.” 

A word must be said to the church. It is per- 
fectly clear that we shall, whether we ought to or 
not, turn more of our religious education over to the 
church. We shall do it for the same reason as we 
are turning more and more of our educational work 
over to the school, because we feel, as parents—busy 
people in the modern world—that we have not the 


gO CONCERNING PARENTS 


equipment, training or insight, to deal wisely with 
some of the difficult problems in religious education. 

And so the family, if it is thoughtful, speaks a 
very clear word to the church. It says, “If you 
want more of the child for your training, if you 
are to have his religious personality largely in your 
hands, you must seriously remember what we tried 
to do when we ourselves, as parents, were the fun- 
damental teachers of religion. 

“Our religion, in so far as it lived in the family, 
was a very simple thing, and you are constantly in 
danger of making your religion too complicated and 
too difficult. It is the genius of religion that it is 
simple and close to life. But it is so fascinating, 
it has so many outside philosophic problems that 
those who deal with it constantly are always in dan- 
ger of making it a complicated and difficult thing. 
If you take our children and put upon them all the 
adult complications, you will ruin their religious 
life. You will no longer, as in the past, be protected 
by the fact that the fundamental teaching of religion 
to children has come from the family. You brought 
your religious teaching to the parents, they gave it 
to their children, and they simplified it in the process. 

“Then you must remember also that, in the nor- 
mal family, religion is very largely a matter of 
behavior, and that is the kind of religion we ask you 
to give to the children put under your instruction. 
Don’t make them feel that ideas or ceremonies or 
anything else outside of activities are the fundamen- 


COORDINATOR OF COMMUNITY FORCES QI 


tal things, however good they are. Put your stress 
upon behavior, so that the child may know that re- 
ligion has to be what one does in every-day life, 
just as the little child has always felt in the past that 
he was getting his religious experience from the little 
things he did that tested his character. 

“Remember that if we have been good parents in 
the past, we have always taught our children with the 
attitude of mind that what we thought, what we 
knew, was not final. We have always said that life 
would bring later information and new insight that 
we were not able to give. Emphasize, therefore, the 
progressive character of religion. Otherwise you 
will yourself be vexed by the stationary and rigid 
type of person that will appear in your own institu- 
tion. You will make it more and more difficult for 
the church to adapt itself to life as it now is.” 

Then we must say to industry, “When you dis- 
rupted family life in the industrial revolution and 
took over from the family what had been largely a 
family occupation, because you were able to make it 
more productive and increase the wealth of life, you 
also took over a responsibility which you have never 
clearly recognized, and we have been obliged, as 
family people, more and more to attempt to control 
your work because of your forgetfulness and your 
indifference. 

“Industry must defend itself on the basis of its 
human value, upon what it does for people, and 
when it. assumes its social task it is merely trying to 


Q2 CONCERNING PARENTS 


do what the family has always tried to do when it 
has apportioned work to its various members. It has 
kept in mind the welfare of the workers.” So we 
have to say to industry, “In so far as you think only 
of production, in so far as you remove your proc- 
esses from the human test of social welfare and fam- 
ily welfare, to that extent you are creating a monster 
which may slip out of your control and make im- 
possible your productive processes and finally wreck 
the social welfare. 

“Everything that industry does must be justified 
eventually because of its value in the life of all of us, 
and that can be tested best by its effect upon family 
life. It therefore can not be a matter of indifference 
what happens to the worker or how he lives or 
whether he doesn’t really live at all but has only half 
a life, because, being human, and increasing his 
power from time to time, he will grow increasingly 
hostile and threaten the existence of industry unless 
you make it possible for him to live a full human life 
while he works for you.” 

And what shall we say to public opinion, partic- 
ularly to the newspaper, the tremendous organ of 
public opinion? ‘We cannot make public opinion 
for our child as once we did. More and more we 
must let our child get his attitude from the great 
outside-of-the-family life which you, more than any- 
body else, manipulate. You must realize your power 
and you must protect us in your use of it. In the 
long run, it is for your welfare as well as for ours. 


COORDINATOR OF COMMUNITY FORCES 9Q3 


“You must take the attitude that the newspaper 
you publish is a family paper always, and you must 
take that attitude in perfect sincerity. Nothing must 
appear, however profitable, that attacks the family in 
any part of its fundamental welfare. This does not 
mean merely that you think of the things that on the 
surface have to do with family life, but rather you 
must recognize that every part of public opinion 
enters into the family and helps or hurts it in its 

activities. 

“Tf you make divorce fascinating, if you make 

crime adventurous, as you often do unconsciously, 
you stand with the forces that hurt the family. And 
your editorials cannot save you from criticism, for 
your editorials do not function to the extent that 
your news does.” 
Finally, the community enterprise which is one of 
the most troublesome, the one where probably there 
will soon be clash, is the health functioning of the 
community. In so far as the family in the past has 
actually functioned consciously in terms of health, its 
-emphasis has been upon prevention. It has had 
| superstitious and foolish ideas. Its spring medicine 
is a very good illustration of that. It has not always 
known what to do, but it has thought of itself with 
reference to health as responsible for the establish- 
ing of good conditions. It has called in the doctor 
when it has failed. It has thought of the doctor as 
one who comes when disease has started. 
At present, we have two attitudes in our medicine. 





04. CONCERNING PARENTS 


One is the old-time attitude of curing disease; the 
other—very vigorous and very young and increas~- 
ingly influential—is the attitude of the prevention of 
disease. 

When the family is actually influential in medicine, 
we shall find there is no way by which we can avoid 
in some degree the socializing of medicine. We shall 
see sO many interests involved in health programs, 
such a tremendous influence for human welfare, that 
the only satisfactory way of utilizing modern sci- 
ence as a means of distributing health will be in 
some way that will make it absolutely near the need 
of every family. We recognize necessarily that this 
means an enormously difficult problem, but the fam- 
ily, once it realizes what ill-health really means, how 
it starts, how it can be prevented, will demand of the 
community that it undertake more and more preven- 
tive medicine, and that will mean trying to give 
every human being the largest possible degree of 
health as a necessary community undertaking 


PA end, 


PARENTS AND THE NEW PsYCHOLOGY 


SUGGESTED READING FOR PART III 


Guidance of Childhood and Youth—Edited for the Child 
Study Association of America by Benjamin C. 
Gruenberg ; Macmillan, 1926. 

Wholesome Childhood—Gladys H. & Ernest R. Groves; 
Houghton Mifflin, 1924. 

The New Psychology and the Parent—H. Crichton 
Miller; Seltzer, 1923. 

The Mental Hygiene of Childhood—William A. White; 
Little, Brown, 1924. 

The Nervous Child—Hector C. Cameron; Frowde, Lon- 
don, 1923. 

A Practical Psychology of Babyhood—Jessie C. Fenton; 
Houghton Mifflin, 1925. 

The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life—Geo. 
Allen & Unwin, London, 1924. 

The Normal Mind—William H. Burnham; Appleton, 
1924. 

Behaviorism—John B. Watson; People’s Institute Pub- 
lishing Co., 1925. 

















PARENTS AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 


THE intelligent fathers and mothers of this genera- 
tion have always been concerned with the bodily 
health and growth of their children. Their attention 
is now extending to the hygiene of the mind as well 
as to that of the body. They are beginning to un- 
derstand that the ideal of the sound mind in the 
sound body is to be achieved only through the ob- 
servance of the principles of mental hygiene as well 
as of those of physical hygiene, and in this field as 
in others they have turned for guidance to the spe- 
cialists. 

In formulating the principles of mental health and 
in emphasizing the value of right conditions for men- 
tal growth and development, the specialists in men- 
tal hygiene have established standards by which par- 
ents can guide themselves in providing a sound en- 
vironment for their children. 

General principles of mental health are evolved 
through the study of specific cases. 

The findings of psychiatrists, habit clinics, and 
child guidance clinics, though they may be based 
largely upon acute situations, are very helpful to the 
‘intelligent lay parent in dealing with the less pro- 
/nounced difficulties that arise in every-day life. 
| | 97 


98 CONCERNING PARENTS 


The cause of individual difficulties, whether found 
in unfortunate conditioning or in emotional instabil- 
ity, can be ascertained only through a knowledge of 
mental hygiene. Furthermore, through an under- 
standing of mental hygiene the parent will often be 
able to discover and remedy his own maladjustments, 
and the parent’s better adjustment will in turn react 
favorably on the child. 

Birp S. Gans, President, 
Child Study Association of America, Inc. 


THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARLY 
YEARS 


By Dr. D. A. THom, DrreEcrTor, 


Division of Mental Hygiene, State Department of Mental 
Disease, Boston 


By force of circumstances, children, taken as a 
group, are destined to spend their early years in 
closest association with adult personalities who are 
lamentably ignorant of the most elementary prin- 
ciples which govern behavior. Children are depend- 
ent upon adults not only for physical care, 
intellectual stimulation and moral precepts, but also 
for an environment in which to live that is not con- 
taminated by the unsatisfied emotional strivings of 
the parents. That the mental life of the child and its 
relation to its future health, happiness and efficiency, 
has been little appreciated in years past, 1s evidenced 
by the lack of recognition this important phase of 
hygiene has received, even at the hands of the va- 
rious professional groups, such as physicians, educa- 
tors, lawyers, and others directly interested in prob- 
lems of the gravest social significance. 

The conduct of the child which deviates from the 
normal and which is unusual or unexpected is as 
great a mystery to the average parent as certain types 

99 


I0O CONCERNING PARENTS 


of adult conduct are to the child. The parents often 
have as little comprehension of the underlying forces 
that account for temper tantrums, fears and person- 
ality twists in the child, as has the child who has 
been punished for some act, the wrongness of which 
could not possibly lie within his comprehension. 

To be sure, when such punishment has been in- 
flicted, the child is aware that something is wrong. 
His whole horizon is changed from one of joy to 
sorrow. He is ostracized and humiliated by an ef- 
fective blow, which has not only hurt his physical 
being, but damaged his self-regarding sentiment. 
He struggles blindly with unseen forces over which 
he has no control, to regain his lost world. The 
whyness and the justice of the act are perhaps years 
beyond his intellectual grasp, and the emotional re- 
action has all the sorrow, bitterness and resentment, 
while it lasts, that any adult could experience. How 
little of all this emotional turmoil is understood by 
the average parent! (And how feeble the attempt to 
interpret or alter the results in terms of mental hy- 
giene!) One would not be far wrong in stating 
that most of the serious situations occurring during 
pre-school years, and the very ones that are most apt 
to leave scars which incapacitate in later life, are 
created by the personalities with which the child has 
to deal. All too frequently we find parents resorting 
to methods for obtaining desirable conduct that are 
simply reflections of their own emotional instability. 

The over-solicitous mother produces the depend- 





THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARLY YEARS IOI 


ent, clinging-vine type of child. The stern, rigid, 
righteous father, with all his strivings for authority 
and self-assertion, is not infrequently the creator of 
the child who feels inferior and inadequate. The 
| parent who is quick-tempered and hands out disci- 
_ pline in the most erratic manner, and the parent who 
bribes and cheats the child, are accountable for a 
_ group of personality deviations in their offspring to 
the same degree as though they had crippled them by 
physical force. 

The foregoing types of parents are found in every 
walk of life, bearing no relation to their cultural or 
intellectual levels. As I have stated elsewhere, in- 
terest and love alone on the part of a parent are not 
enough to insure success in handling the innumerable 
problems which are presented during the child’s early 
years. In fact, the very love that the parent bears 
for the child may be the stumbling block that pre- 
_ vents successfully fulfilling the obligations of parent- 
hood. An intelligent approach to many of the 
problems of childhood is prevented by excessive 
worry, anxiety and needless fear on the part of the 
parents, 

If the foregoing be true, as most of those will 
agree whose training, experience and education have 
been directed to problems concerning the psycho- 
| pathology of childhood, there can be no more impor- 
tant function for that branch of medicine known as 
mental hygiene, than to educate, in so far as possible, 
_ the parent, the teacher, the nurse; in fact all those 


102 CONCERNING PARENTS 


individuals who, in a general way, have the respon- 
sibility for the mental life of the child in their 
charge. 

The task at hand is not an easy one. Owing to 
the fact that there is such wide diversity in the con- 
stitutional make-up of each and every individual, and 
that these individuals are called upon to adjust them- 
selves to environments that are so varied, and so 
constantly changing, it is with great difficulty, and 
always with more or less danger, that broad generali- 
zations are set forth. There are, however, certain 
fundamental principles of mental hygiene which are 
well within the grasp and can be intelligently applied 
by the layman. 

The first and most important step in this prob- 
lem of education is to impress upon the minds of the 
parent and teacher that the child has a mental life, 
a fact all too frequently ignored. Let us not forget 
that just as a child has ears, eyes and lungs, kidneys, 
a brain and a heart, he also has instincts and emo- 
tions. This immature individual has an inherent 
hunger for self-expression, which is constantly im- 
pinging upon a code of laws and customs, of which 
he has no understanding. Keep in mind that the 
child has plans, hopes and ambitions, has doubts, 
fears and misgivings, has joys and sorrows, some 
very slight and fanciful, others very deep and real. 
His emotional life is gratified and thwarted pretty 
much the same during the pre-school years as in 
later life. 





THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARLY YEARS 103 


The conduct of the child is simply his reaction to 
his environment; it is the result of a struggle between 
his instinctive strivings and the limitations and in- 
hibitions set up by his environment. The type of 
conduct that is approved by society is usually the 
type that does not annoy nor inconvenience any of its 
-members. The conduct which meets with disap- 
proval is that which brings the individual into con- 
flict with the parent or society. In the pre-school 
child, his hyper-activity, restlessness, lack of concen- 
tration, negativism, curiosity, etc., are most apt to 
cause parents concern; while the child who is quiet 
and reserved, obedient and well-mannered, who 

steals away from the group and plays by himself, or 
clings tenaciously to his mother, who is inclined to be 
introspective and self-centered, passes by unnoticed. 
His intolerant attitude toward the frivolities of other 
children of his age may even be considered worthy 
of commendation. He is looked upon as being self- 
reliant and is commended for his ability to amuse 
himself. It may be, however, that the very person- 
ality traits which keep the quiet youngster from get- 
ting into conflict with his environment are those 
which are most serious and demanding of attention, 
so far as his mental health is concerned. 

In order to understand the conduct of any human 
being, whether it be child or adult, whether found 
in the nursery or prison, the conduct must be 1n- 
terpreted in terms of the individual’s total experi- 
ence, training and education, and it is equally 


104 CONCERNING PARENTS 


important that one appreciate the fact that, during 
the earlier years of life, the child’s reactions to his 
environment approach more closely to the instinctive 
level than at any other time. The primary objective 
is the preservation of his own physical body, and 
the development of his own personality, and these 
activities are manifested by strivings in certain def- 
inite directions. Dr. McCurdy* expresses these 
strivings as follows: 

1. Bodily pleasure, such as desire for food, drink 
and creature comforts, and bodily sensations 
of a pleasant nature. 

2. Intellectual curiosity; desire for new experi- 
ence. 

3. A lust for power and for exhibiting it. 

4. A lust for recognition. 

5. Desire for security. 

If those who are dealing with children, whether 
they be parents, teachers, judges or probation offi- 
cers, would only keep in mind the fact that the 
normal child’s desire for power and recognition is 
quite as fundamental as his desire for food the so- 
called asocial conduct in children would not seem so 
bizarre and unintelligible. 

If it be that the child is handicapped by a lack of 
training, experience and education, which necessarily 
leads to conduct of an instinctive type, there are 
compensations, inasmuch as certain mental charac- 


1John T. McCurdy, “Problems in Dynamic Psychology,” 
PP. 273-274. 





THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARLY YEARS I05 


teristics, which go to make up the personality of the 
child, are more marked and usable during the pre- 
school years than at any other period. I refer to the 
plasticity of the child’s mind, his tendency to imitate 
and to accept suggestion, and his love of approbation, 
all of which should be brought into play in any at- 
tempt to alter conduct. Many parents have been 
brought face to face with the fact that the undesir- 
able conduct on the part of a child is simply an 
imitation of their own reactions to life and that ill- 
ness and incapacity have been suggested by an over- 
solicitous mother. They have been pleasantly 
surprised at the results obtained when praise has 
been substituted for blame. 

Temper tantrums and pugnacity spring not infre- 
quently from the emotion of jealousy, which casual 
observation shows has been developed by the parents, 
sometimes for their own amusement. It therefore 
behooves parents to pause occasionally and take 
stock of the mental characteristics which go to make 
up the personality of the child, and to consider them 
in terms of assets and liabilities. It is futile to go 
on in a haphazard sort of fashion, using the trial 
and error method, which frequently results in allevi- 
ating one defect and replacing it by another more 
serious. 

Up to this point we have considered very briefly 
how personalities become twisted and warped be- 
cause of unfortunate relationships in the home, 
brought about, to a very large extent, by lack of 


106 CONCERNING PARENTS 


understanding between parents and child. The 
causative factors in most of these situations are quite 
obvious, and the treatment, to a very large extent, 
is that of the parent. The home itself is perhaps 
comparatively free from domestic strife, and there 
are no outside forces contributing to the difficulty of 
the problem to be solved. 

There is no necessity to build up for the child a 
home that is absolutely free from conflict. It is not 
desirable to place the child in an environment that is 
quite artificial and without difficult situations for the 
child to combat. Fear and failure are both factors 
which the individual must confront all through life, 
and it is well that the child learn during early years 
how to meet failure as well as success. There is no 
need, however, of stressing this point, because the 
average home and environment will, without any 
special preparation, in the nature of things, present 
situations sufficiently numerous and trying to test 
out the normal child of pre-school years. 

There is the home, however, where friction is the 
rule rather than the exception—where nagging, com- 
plaining and quarreling result in turmoil; and there 
is the home where there is no objective evidence of 
disharmony to the casual observer, but where lack 
of cooperation, sympathy, understanding and team 
play produce a mental atmosphere that is most un- 
healthy. We often think of such a home as being 
produced by the incompatability of the personalities 
who dominate the household. 





THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARLY YEARS 107 


In a recent study* of problem children coming 
from friction homes, observations have been made 
which are of sufficient interest to attract attention. 
These children, fifty in number, were all of pre- 
school age, without intellectual defects, and about 
equally divided between the two sexes. All these 
children were exposed, from two to six years, to an 
environment where friction and disharmony were 
constant. It is difficult, indeed, to account for fric- 
tion in homes by any one particular factor. Never- 


| theless, in these homes there were certain outstand- 


ing contributory causes which were sufficiently well 


defined to justify consideration, and, not infre- 
quently, two or more of these forces were in opera- 
tion at the same time. The economic problems were 
outstanding. Inability or lack of desire on the part 
of the father to provide adequately for the family 
stood in the foreground. Intellectual gulfs, brought 
about by grades of education, were frequent and fun- 
damental. Differences in race or nationality; vice 
and bad habits on the part of one or both parents; 
neurotic traits and emotional instability, as well as 
definite mental and physical disease; interfering rel- 
atives; and, at times, marked differences in the ages 
of the parents, leading to wide variation in interests, 
all played an important part as underlying factors 
contributing to friction in the home. 

It is not difficult to understand that the atmosphere 


1 Domestic Conflict and Its Effect on Children—Dorothy E. 
Hall (Habit Clinics, Boston). 


108 CONCERNING PARENTS 


of such a home would influence the developing per- 
sonality of the child. Invariably there is no agree: 
ment as to the disciplinary measures to be utilized. 
These problems are all argued before the children, 
who learn very early that the house is divided against 
itself. Under such conditions there is civil war op- 
erating at all times, the children taking sides with 
the parent who is most apt to gratify their immediate 
wishes. 

When we stop to think that imitation and sugges- 
tion are operating with their greatest potency at this 
particular period of life, we are not surprised that 
the mental atmosphere created in such a home fails to 
develop the stability that is so essential to meet prob- 
lems in the world outside. Even that mental char- 
acteristic which is so important—love of approbation 
——is neutralized, since invariably what one parent 
approves of, the other parent is sure to disapprove, 
and the child is left in a state of doubt and indecision 
as to the best way of adjusting his needs and in- 
terests to his present environment. 

It is not at all surprising that the normal child 
meets this abnormal situation in what society calls 
an asocial way. These asocial ways may be certain 
physical manifestations, such as disturbance in sleep, 
feeding difficulties, abnormal sex reactions, or, what 
is more likely, the development of certain undesir- 
able personality traits, such as outbursts of temper, 
stubbornness, selfishness, pugnacity, jealousy, cruelty, 
a domineering attitude toward those whom he looks 





THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARLY YEARS I09Q9 


| upon as being weaker, and fear and cowardice 
toward those whom he thinks superior. It 1s not 
: surprising to find that a very large per cent of all 
| our problems of asocial conduct, such as destructive- 
| ness, lying, stealing, truancy and assaults, come from 
the friction home. This means, then, that the fric- 
| tion home is the workshop which specializes in turn- 
| ing out children who, during the first six years of 
| life, fail to develop habits and inhibitions which are 
| so essential to efficiency and happiness in later life. 
Let us take an example of the product of the fric- 
tion home, going into considerable detail as to the 
| background which is rather typical of many of the 
| cases which come up for consideration. 
| Dick, aged five, was referred to the Clinic by the 
| Nursery School, because of vomiting and destructive 
| behavior. He was a small, pasty-looking boy, with 
| shaggy dark hair, large brown eyes, rather thin face, 
| with a receding chin. Physical examination showed 
| him to be without physical defect except for a reced- 
| ing jaw. His general health was good. There was 
| a history, however, of five convulsions, which oc- 
curred between the ages of one and three years. 
| Perhaps the best way to describe his personality 
| will be by mentioning some of his conduct at the 
| nursery school and at home. His teacher reports 
him as selfish and tyrannical, refusing to share any- 
| thing belonging to him and screaming in a temper 
when another child has something he wants. He 
teases the smaller children and plays roughly with 


IIo CONCERNING PARENTS 


them, throwing the toys about in an aimless, excited 
way. Before visitors, he is even more active, show- 
ing off in a silly fashion, shouting, running about 
and making strange animal-like noises. Dick seems 
to appreciate fully his power in his home and takes 
every opportunity to use it. He whines and fusses 
for what he wishes, and if this method fails, he stages 
a tantrum in which he shrieks, hits and kicks. He is 
jealous of his parents and objects to his mother’s 
even patting the dog. At night he refuses to go to 
bed until his mother goes, and insists upon sleeping 
with her. If any attempt is made at discipline, he 
screams in an angry, tearless fashion, or simulates 
the beginning of a convulsion, and father immedi- 
ately dances attendance. Mealtime is just one more 
struggle, when he refuses anything he does not like 
and vomits if urged to eat, and then later demands 
milk and crackers. Often, after any unusually stim- 
ulating day, he has night terrors, sometimes for three 
or four nights in succession. 

As a background for this picture we have a home 
situation in which the mother claims to have been 
unhappy with her husband since marriage. She calls 
Dick’s father a “typically spoiled mother’s boy,” says 
he was never taught any self-control nor to give in 
to any one. He is selfish, willful and unreasonable; 
he throws all responsibility on her, and although he 
refuses to let her carry out any of her plans without 
interference, he blames her if anything goes wrong. 

After the first year of marriage, the father had a 


THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARLY YEARS III 


“nervous breakdown” and for four years stayed 
home and let his wife support him by doing steno- 
graphic work. Finally her doctor told her she was 
foolish to do it, and she “made it so hot” for her 
husband that he has worked ever since. 

Nevertheless, the situation has grown steadily 
worse. Her husband was disgusted when he learned 
she was pregnant, and nagged and abused her the 
entire time she was carrying the child. Since Dick’s 
birth, his father has seemed devoted to him, but in 
a selfish way. The mother thinks that the father’s 
fear that Dick will have a convulsion governs his 
treatment of the boy, and is due more to the loss and 
inconvenience it would cause him if Dick died than 
to any real interest in the child as a person. He will 
not allow Dick to be disciplined, preferring to give 
him his way and have immediate peace and no cry- 
ing; and the mother, not daring to interfere, makes 
an ineffectual attempt to secure obedience by nag- 
ging. 

When Dick was about two, his father became 
physically abusive to his mother, and she left him one 
night, going to the home of a friend. The father 
had a most difficult time with Dick and the next day 
begged her to return. Since then he has not abused 
her physically, but she feels that the biting remarks 
and continued criticism which she now suffers are 
almost worse. There have been various episodes 
which have made her feel that she could not endure 
the situation longer, and she has consulted a lawyer 


112 CONCERNING PARENTS 


about a divorce, always putting off the final pro- 
cedure, thinking she must keep a home for Dick. 

Lately, however, she is beginning to feel that the 
bitterness of the home atmosphere to which he 1s 
subjected may be worse for Dick than the effect of 
breaking up the home. She has tried to discuss with 
Dick’s father the consequences to Dick of hearing 
bickering and quarreling whenever he is at home, and 
of hearing each parent accuse and belittle the other, 
and argue over his symptoms, since such conflict not 
only suggests continued undesirable behavior, but the 
use of what appears to be the start of a convulsion to 
gain parental obedience. The father merely swears 
in answer and allows the child to continue to do just 
what his mother has told him not to do. The situ- 
ation is also complicated by the presence in the home 
of an old lady who brought up Dick’s father and who 
now takes his part against mother. She disapproves 
of mother because she has continued to do office work 
and keeps a rather careless, untidy home. 

At present Dick is spending five days a week in 
the nursery school and his mother has succeeded in 
establishing an early bed-time for him, so he is con- 
cerned as little as possible with the home conflict. 
He has shown marked improvement in his ability to 
get along with the other children at school, and now 
eats heartily of whatever food is given him. His 
teacher feels that he is making a distinct effort to 
gain approval by conforming to the requirements 
made of the group. However, his mother sees only 


THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARLY YEARS I13 


slight improvement; he seems to dance about delib- 
erately, doing what he is asked not to do, knowing 
that he loses the approval of one parent with a cer- 
tainty of gaining at least the consent of the other, 
and obviously following in his reactions to them the 
sort of responses they make to each other. 

In this case, the physical heritage, as well as the 
social, is probably an important factor. In view of 
the fact that the boy has had convulsions, and has 
shown extreme emotional instability, his inheritance 
cannot be ignored, although, judging from his rather 
quick response to the regulated life at the school, one 
feels that he might have done well enough in a home 
where the social heritage would have been more ade- 
quate. However, since suggestion and imitation are 
such important factors in the life of any child, it is 
not surprising that this child, inherently unstable 
from the emotional standpoint, assumed the erratic 
behavior which he daily saw in parents, especially 
since these methods worked out to his immediate 
advantage. 

Dick’s behavior pattern at home has been con- 
ditioned by antagonism, discontent and selfishness, 
and it seems doubtful whether more than a limited 
change can be brought about in his conduct there 
unless the fundamental feeling of the parents toward 
each other can be altered. Fortunately, the mental 
life of a child is so plastic that if he can be made to 
appreciate his relationship with other individuals 
and to feel that approval is going to contribute to 


II4 CONCERNING PARENTS 


his material welfare, he may find it expedient to re- 
place his blind, selfish striving, by satisfaction 
through conforming. But one wonders if, after 
spending his most impressionable years in emotional 
confusion, Dick’s later conformity and control will 
be more than a rather flimsy super-structure. 

The following case comes from quite a different 
home, both parents being educated, having no eco- 
nomic difficulties, both codperating and in entire 
agreement as to the training and care of the child, 
and where the results of their training and care and 
supervision, up to a certain point, have been con- 
sidered not only satisfactory, but quite ideal. 

A little girl, aged five years, was taken to a clinic 
by her overwrought parents, because suddenly, and 
quite unexpectedly, she had refused to take food or 
swallow. The morning that I was called to the office 
in consultation, the father was anxiously but silently 
pacing the floor; the mother was weeping and wring- 
ing her hands; the little girl was sitting quietly next 
to the doctor, wearing a masklike expression. The 
saliva was dribbling from her mouth to her frock, 
which was soaked; she seemed only casually inter- 
ested. The doctor stated that, three days ago, for 
some unknown reason, the child had refused to take 
any food, and that she was constantly demanding 
that her mother reassure her that it was all right to 
swallow, and in spite of the many reassurances given, 
she had refused to swallow and dribbled all day long. 

A brief interview revealed the following: It ap- 


THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARLY YEARS IT15 


peared that the mother had frequently told the child 
that she should never allow any one to kiss her, and 
in order to make her statement more impressive, she 
had informed the child that kissing caused infection 
by germs, and that when the germs were swallowed, 
little girls died. It happened that on the afternoon 
previous to the day her unusual conduct began, the 
child had gone to her first dancing class, and some 
man, she states, stooped down, patted her on the 
head, and kissed her on the mouth. How much of 
an impression this incident made upon the mind of 
the child is difficult to evaluate at this time, but the 
important aspect of the problem seems quite obvious. 

The parents of the child, who were quite intelli- 
gent in handling most of their problems, entertained 
some rather unusual ideas about bringing up a child 
on an intellectual basis. Their principle was that the 
child should not be spoiled by attention, praise or 
affection. It was taken for granted that things 
should go well; if they went otherwise moralization 
and punishment followed. The child was never 
boisterous, her table manners were perfect, her 
speech grammatically correct, she was never disobe- 
dient, she played only under supervision with most 
carefully selected playmates; her neatness, punc- 
tuality and general conformity to parental laws were 
accepted as a matter of course. The emotional upset 
which developed after the child had been kissed 
would ordinarily have been eradicated after a little 
explanation, had it not been for the fact that, quite 


116 CONCERNING PARENTS 


as unexpectedly as the symptoms had developed, the 
parents began to take notice of the child. They not 
only gave her a little attention, but they became ex- 
tremely worried and anxious. The child, for the first 
time in her life, became the center of attention. It 
was a new experience, and one which was so pleasing 
to her starved emotional life that it is not at all sur- 
prising that she clung to it with great tenacity and 
gave it up with considerable reluctance. 

The over-solicitous parent stuffs and over-feeds 
the emotional life of the child, whereas the stern, 
forbidding type of parent starves the emotional life 
of the child. These are the two extremes. 

In closing, it might be well to consider what 
mental hygiene has to contribute to the understand- 
ing of the problems of childhood. What are its pos- 
sibilities and what are its limitations, and how best 
may they be attained and overcome? 

In the first case cited, the whole situation is so 
fundamentally wrong, and the interest and codpera- 
tion which we may expect to obtain from the parents 
so meager, that we are absolutely dependent, for the 
moment at least, upon changing the environment, in 
so far as possible, and trusting that in spite of, rather 
than because of the parents, the child will pull 
through these next few tempestuous years, and will 
emerge not too badly distorted by his experiences to 
fulfill some useful function in life. Heredity and 
environment both have been stacked against him, 
and, optimistic as we should like to be, we know that 


THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARLY YEARS I17 


the future is grave. That does not mean, however, 
that inefficiency is the finished product. It may be 
that the clinic and nursery school and other oppor- 
tunities that are given him for making normal, 
healthy contacts outside of the home, will have played 
their part in his future development. 

In the second case in dealing with intelligent par- 
ents who simply started out with a false premise, and 
were grossly ignorant of the fact that their child 
had a mental life, much could be accomplished ; and 
there is every reason to believe that the acute episode 
which brought the little girl to the psychiatrist was 
a blessing. It gave the parents an opportunity to 
reconstruct their plan of training. It gave them an 
opportunity for participating in and enjoying the 
activities of their child, who, in turn, will have, for 
the first time, a chance to express her emotional life, 
and not develop into a purely mechanistic type of in- 
dividual, repressed and inhibited by an early environ- 
ment over which she had no control. 

So it may be seen that there are wonderful possi- 
bilities and definite limitations to what mental hy- 
giene can accomplish, depending to a very large 
extent, not so much upon the patient, who is simply 
the product of an unhealthy environment, but upon 
the codperation, interest, and, to a lesser degree, the 
intelligence of the personalities with whom the child 
comes in contact. 


FROM CHILDHOOD TO YOUTH 


By Marion E. Kenwortuy, M.D. 


Medical Director, Bureau of Children’s Guidance, 
New York City 


THE greatest contribution in the past ten years 
made by social psychiatry to our understanding and 
treatment of personality disorders, has been through 
the emphasis placed upon the cause and effect rela- 
tionships existing in both mental health and disease. 

In our study of the problems of childhood as well 
as of adulthood, as a result of an ever-increasing re- 
finement of technique, we find ourselves giving more 
and more consideration to the early period of life ex- 
perience of the child, within which the emotional 
patterns in response to his relationships and experi- 
ence are laid down. The indisputable truth of the 
fact that the genesis of attitudes and the patterns of 
human relationships are determined for the most 
part during the early childhood period, is well ex- 
emplified in our study of the cases of adult neurosis 
and psychogenetic psychosis. Problems of unadjust- 
ment at this level of an individual’s experience, how- 
ever, do not lend themselves to simple methods of 


treatment to accomplish rehabilitation and social 
118 


FROM CHILDHOOD TO YOUTH II9Q 


cure; hence the need for greater emphasis upon the 
preventive aspects of these issues. 

The fact that every individual begins his life ex- 
perience as a child creates, then, a universal issue of 
dependency. The need of the baby to depend upon 
the personalities within his immediate environment 
for all the care which he demands, creates the mul- 
tiple possibilities of satisfaction and dissatisfaction 
in response to the handling which he receives. 

The fact that, too frequently, the parental interest 
leads to emphasis on the physical care of the child to 
the exclusion of any other consideration would seem 
to indicate the rather general lack of knowledge of 
some of the fundamental issues of personality or- 
ganization which should be facilitated through wise 
care and handling on the part of parents. 

The need to establish healthy habits of control 
during this early period of growth has been discussed 
by doctors and educators for a long time, but only 
within the last decade or so have we emphasized the 
importance of healthy attitudes in response to this 
early parental training. That is to say, the issues of 
authority-dependency, so-called, reveal many possible 
sources of personality unadjustment and conduct dis- 
order. An attempt will be made then to cover in the 
main some of the more outstanding issues which may 
occur within the child-parent relationship. 

Because attitudes are so largely created by the 
emotional elements underlying the experiences which 
determine them, it would seem important to empha- 


120 CONCERNING PARENTS 


size the necessity on the part of the parents to fix as 
their ideal of achievement, in handling the problems 
presented by the child, a kind of objectivity which 
can be attained only by the recognition of the need 
to meet the issues of parental control and teaching 
without the bias which is bound to creep in, if one 
does not accept the need of disassociating one’s own 
problems from those of the child. 

Take for example, the father who has always pos- 
sessed an overwhelming desire for a professional 
career which he conceives might give him social pres- 
tige and community responsibilities. To accomplish 
this would give him an ego type of satisfaction, suf- 
ficiently powerful to overcome and perhaps com- 
pletely obliterate his own simple frugal beginnings 
with their concurrent dissatisfaction. These hopes 
and aspirations needs must be set aside however, in 
the course of events which force him early into an 
industrial position. Economic responsibilities fol- 
low which preclude the possibility of further pursuit 
of his scholastic and professional aspirations. The 
summary removal of such a source of satisfaction 
does not allay, and may even intensify his emotional 
need for a compensatory satisfaction. As the years 
go by and his boy reaches the age when he too must 
seek a place for himself in the sun, the early desires 
of the father may at this point recreate themselves. 
Identifying himself with the boy, he may seek a 
solution through superimposing a career of his own 
choice upon his son. 


FROM CHILDHOOD TO YOUTH I2I 


If perchance, as occasionally happens, the boy has 
certain intellectual limitations or special disabilities 
which preclude the possibility of satisfactory accom- 
plishment of the father’s goal, he may find himself 
exposed to the exigencies of a scholastic burden far 
beyond his ability. If, added to his intellectual 
handicaps and his feeling of failure, he must needs 
carry the knowledge of the disappointment he has 
caused the father, especially if the tie which exists 
between father and son emphasizes the emotional 
need for security on the part of the boy, it is not 
inconceivable that this combination of circumstances 
may and often will precipitate a series of destructive 
reactions which tend to interfere with the normal 
process of personality adjustment even within the 
simple intellectual limits of the individual’s own 
capacity. 

The need to recognize and evaluate the qualities 
and potentialities of each child in terms of his physi- 
cal and intellectual make-up is an easier concept to 
promulgate than that of attempting to evaluate the 
emotional elements in his personality. And there- 
fore this most important fact is frequently slighted 
in making plans for vocational and other adjust- 
ments. The large percentage of unsatisfied and un- 
adjusted humans point to the potential failure of 
such a program. Unless we habituate ourselves to 
discover the elements which go to make up the third 
phase of the personality integration, that is, the emo- 
tional equipment and response to experience of the 


I22 CONCERNING PARENTS 


individual, we cannot hope to achieve the program 
of prevention so needed. 

If we evaluate the elements which go to make up 
the so-called “free-willed choice” of response on any 
occasion, we find emotionally determined patterns 
playing an important part. This should challenge 
us to emphasize the importance of looking objec- 
tively upon each issue which arises, in order to rec- 
ognize clearly the many cause and effect factors in 
our own attitudes, before we attempt to make an 
evaluation of the child’s response. To habitually 
set ourselves this task would obviate the many pit- 
falls precipitated by factors perhaps temporarily lost 
sight of in ourselves, which tend to bring up issues 
in our handling of children and produce unhealthy, 
destructive reactions both in ourselves and in them. 

A mother who has gained certain positive ego 
satisfactions from her years of experience as an ef- 
ficient housekeeper frequently finds it hard to under- 
stand why her values of precision cannot immediately 
be accepted by her daughter without dispute. To de- 
mand that the daughter of twelve wash the dishes 
three times a day and keep the kitchen in order ac- 
cording to her mother’s standards may easily produce 
an irritating response from the child. 

The inability of the mother to see the emotional 
elements in her own attitudes explains why each at- 
tempt to get the mother to talk about it, on the part 
of the girl, her father or the social worker always 
produced the same response, “I had to do it when I 


FROM CHILDHOOD TO YOUTH’ 123 


was her age. Why should she not do it as well?” 
It is obvious that in theory the mother’s position is 
easily justified. The emotional factors which this 
twelve-year-old brings to this task do, however, 
throw some light upon the reasons for her refusal 
to cooperate. 

First, the child who is the oldest resists the fact 
that she is the oldest. “Why do I have to always de 
things? I don’t want to grow up, I want to play, 
climb trees and not be ‘responsible.’ ” 

This last new-found word in her vocabulary is the 
contribution of the mother, who argues that when 
she was ten she was obliged to take the responsibility 
of a household and a family, following the death of 
her mother. To an argument already undignified by 
an expression of anger on the part of the mother 
and a tantrum on the part of daughter is added this 
seeming ungracious response, “If you were dead it 
would be different, because I wouldn’t have some 
one to go over every dish and fork to check me up.” 
This ended the immediate storm which was followed, 
as on frequent occasions before, by isolation for the 
day to “think it over.” | 

No one can say what the thoughts of the child 
were. Piling through in rapid succession, come the 
wish to die, hatred towards the mother ‘‘who could 
not understand,” the mother “who put her house be- 
fore her children,” the wish to run away, the phan- 
tasy of “the sorrow of the family when they found 
her body floating in the river,” the wish for speedy 


124 CONCERNING PARENTS 


revenge, “just to tell her once how mean she is and 
then never to speak to her again until she apol- 
ogizes’’ and so on through the weary hours of the 
morning. As noon creeps by and the smell of food 
insinuates itself, the feeling of hunger assists in 
bringing about the temporary cessation of hostilities. 
With a deep sigh, which indicates the depth of feel- 
ing behind the expressed thought “I am the most 
unhappy girl in the world—but I must eat’—she 
seeks the mother and, with a muttered apology, takes 
her place at the table. From the glances of the 
brothers and sisters it is evident that the fracas of the 
morning is common property. The winking re- 
sponse to the swift look of the brother indicates the 
long series of raggings which lie in store for her 
later on. Is it hard to picture the destructiveness 
of such an habitual round of irritations in this fam- 
ily group? The tendency to morbid daydreams and 
the chronic feeling of being misunderstood foster 
the attitude of self-pity. These if unchecked may 
continue through the years as a source of unhealthy 
satisfaction and escape whenever the issues of reality 
become too strenuous. 

It is important at this juncture in our story to 
point out the fact that merely taking a cross section 
of the child-mother relationship suggests the need of 
more real understanding. To determine the deeper 
underlying factors behind these attitudes we must 
needs study the whole period of family contact from 
infancy to the present period and, through the con- 


FROM CHILDHOOD TO YOUTH 125 


sideration of all the elements, the emotional determi- 
nants underlying the behavior will invariably be 
found. Treatment, then, implies a complete study of 
all the issues involved prior to any attempt at adjust- 
ment. 

This sort of problem occurs so frequently in the 
child-parent contact that in certain quarters there is 
an inclination to interpret the reactions of the grow- 
ing group as an evidence of an age of revolt. By 
some this desire to overthrow parental authority is 
explained by the laxness of moral training, by the ab- 
sence of true religious education; by others it is 
called the madness of the age!—while by still others 
it is described as part of flapper psychology. One is 
inclined, however, through the medium of stories 
brought to us through contact with individuals of 
older generations, to believe that this type of emo- 
tional reaction to issues of parental authority is not 
new, but is an age-old response on the part of the 
child, who blindly and emotionally seeks to throw 
off the yoke. Perhaps there is a freer expression of 
irritation, a more patent dissemination upon the im- 
mediate landscape of the effect of feeling tone in the 
child of to-day, and admittedly at times this high 
explosive is not comfortable to live with. The fact 
is, however, that if there is an expression of an un- 
healthy emotional response, the parents, teachers and 
other parental surrogates are furnished with a re- 
liable index of a problem which exists and needs 
remedying. This remedy must come not through 


126 CONCERNING PARENTS 


blind emphasis of the divine right of the parent to 
be a parent and hence to wield the authoritative dic- 
tatorship over the child’s experiences, but rather 
through the utilization of the opportunities within 
the reach of all of us to understand and relieve cer- 
tain of the causal elements existing within the imme- 
diate environment as well as within the child. 

This implies first an interest on the part of the 
parent to learn and secondly a willingness to utilize 
all of the facts in the case to bring about adjustment 
opportunities. This naturally includes the need of 
developing insight into and freedom from some of 
the unhealthy attitudes within their own personali- 
ties. The fact that the problems of parents are so 
often deep seated and that the genesis of their atti- 
tudes is found far back in their own experience at 
the hands of their parents or in their phases of the 
authority-dependency relationships indicates the 
scope and the ramifications of the solution processes. 

A simple and yet significant example of this is 
furnished by a mother who brings her child for study 
because of her general rebelliousness and refusal to 
adhere to the daily schedule of health which she, the 
mother, has organized. To say that the child ate, 
played and slept by the clock is putting it mildly. 
When asked why she had chosen such a rigid routine, 
the mother tells the following story: 

“When my brother and I were small my mother 
said many times ‘I shall never bring you up as 





FROM CHILDHOOD TO YOUTH 127 


strictly as I was brought up. My mother (the pa- 
tient’s great-grandmother) was much too stern. 
She believed in regular hours for everything, and 
when I found myself in the midst of a thrilling story 
there was no way of getting to the end of the chapter 
even though the heroine was suspended from a rope 
over a precipice and the villain was busy hacking it 
at the other end, because it was time to do dishes, 
to go to bed, or some other equally irritating task.’ ” 

True to her word the grandmother is reported as 
permitting both the patient’s mother and uncle every 
freedom. If a thrilling book intrigued the interest 
they habitually stayed up to finish it or read in bed 
even to the wee small hours of the morning. If an 
exciting game lapped over the dinner hour the com- 
pletion of the game and a late arrival never upset 
the menage. If too tired in the morning after a 
night’s reading, late sleeping was permitted even 
though it precluded the possibility of going to school. 
Surprisingly enough, these habits of childhood suf- 
fered serious criticism when the brother and sister 
came home from their first college contacts, where 
they had discovered some of the drawbacks of their 
hitherto completely satisfying mode of living. Com- 
paring notes, the mother states, ‘““‘We resolved then 
and there that if we had children they should never 
be brought up in such a hit or miss fashion.” 

Both extremes of program would lend themselves 
to much discussion. Our interest at this point is, 
however, the recognition of the emotional elements 


128 CONCERNING PARENTS 


which built up these diverse concepts of parental con- 
trol. 

If all parental issues were as simple as these and 
could lend themselves to such easy adaptation our 
problems would not be great. In reality the reverse 
is true. In the backgrounds of parental growth we 
find so frequently evidences of unhappy childhood re- 
lationships which very naturally become reflected in 
the handling of a child even without the knowledge 
or desire on the part of the parent. 

Needless to say, a complete listing of the problems 
involving the emotional, physical and intellectual ex- 
perience would reproduce the long list which we find 
confronting the child to-day in his period of growth 
and adjustment, first, in the relationships within the 
home with parents, brothers and sisters, and then in 
the broader social contacts of the school, the church 
and the neighborhood. 

The recognition of the universality of such emo- 
tional problems of maladjustment should do more to 
emphasize the fundamental importance of preparing 
the present generation and the generations to come 
for their responsibility of future parenthood. It will 
be only the more careful consideration of issues in- 
volved, in the early periods of growth, that will 
assist us gradually to establish the groundwork for 
a more constructive and healthy adult experience. 
The emotional maturity which this implies will pre- 
clude the possibility of such unfortunate experiences 
as Alice, a young high school girl of seventeen, met 


FROM CHILDHOOD TO YOUTH 129 


in the mother contacts. The child is reported as hav- 
ing had a nervous breakdown. She is failing in 
school, is unable to concentrate, feels timid, can’t 
sleep and threatens to run away. 

The mother of the child, in discussing her own 
problems as well as those of the patient, revealed 
many significant facts. The picture of the child’s 
mother was made more complete by a maternal uncle 
who reports her as willful, selfish and over-emo- 
tional. He further says that she has never confided 
in any one but has attempted to lead her life inde- 
pendently. Early she became her father’s favorite 
and developed a very strong attachment for him. 
With the paternal relationship furnishing her with 
much real satisfaction there grew an excessive hatred 
of her mother which persisted until the latter’s death. 
Even now she claims she is incapable of thinking of 
her mother without a feeling of hate. When her 
sister, the second child in line, arrived on the scene, 
she developed such intense jealousy, even though she 
was but two, that she scratched, bit and struck her, 
whenever she could get her hands upon her. 

The stormy period of growth of this woman is 
not hard to picture. When at the age of twenty-two 
she married a man to please her father, her prob- 
lems of adjustment did not diminish. Instead, their 
marital life was fraught with much discord and 
bickering. The loathing of any contact with her 
husband is explained by her as the natural disgust 
at utilizing conjugal relations for any other purpose 


I30 CONCERNING PARENTS 


than to beget offspring. So emphatic was she about 
this that the husband has always conformed to her 
wishes. With habitual lack of insight, when dis- 
cussing this aspect of their marital life, she glibly 
says, “If he had not acceded to my wishes, I would 
have left him.”’ 

Convinced of the efficacy of prenatal influence, she 
attempted to mold the lives of her future offspring 
during the period of pregnancy so that they might 
fulfill all her own unsatisfied desires. She further 
states quite frankly that this belief has been behind 
all of their subsequent training. 

Consider the possibilities for unhappiness which 
lie in wait for our patient, the oldest of a group of 
six. By virtue of her place of priority, she naturally 
has been the recipient of the mother’s most ardent 
attempts to make out of her the ideal kind of person 
that she herself dreamed of being. Among other 
things, she wanted each of her children to be indi- 
vidual, and concentrated on this as well as other aspi- 
rations during the period of embryonic growth. 
Now she fails completely to see that Alice has any 
problems, or differs at all from her ideals for her. 
She reiterates that all of her children are perfect. 
She refuses to admit that she has made any mistakes 
in their up-bringing, and when the child’s father 
steps into the picture a serious fight usually results. 
The mother admits that whenever her wishes are 
crossed her most successful means of getting around 
her husband is to fly into a tantrum, yet she resents 





FROM CHILDHOOD TO YOUTH I31I 


| the fact that her husband handles her like a spoiled 
| child even in the presence of the children. 

These general problems reflected in her habitual 
| attitudes illustrate a multiplicity of factors which are 
frequently found in varied combinations in other 
| adult and parental issues. To note them thus briefly, 
| we must emphasize the degree to which this mother’s 
| maladjusted personality has created problems of ad- 
| justment for all her children. 

| During the prenatal period she wished Alice to be 
| an opera singer, so she walked through the woods 
| warbling for hours at a time. Although she admits 
that persistence is a trait which is lacking in her per- 
sonality (one of the few faults she will concede al- 
| though she has an acceptable rationalization to 
| explain it, inasmuch as she feels that it is a part of 
| her artistic temperament) she attempts to develop a 
| persistence in her future child through forcing her- 
| self to carry out some hated task each day. The fact 
| is noteworthy that Alice is the direct antithesis of 
| persistence in her efforts, that she fails to succeed in 
school, that she has no sense of rhythm, and lacks 
| true pitch. These along with her sensitiveness, shy- 
| ness, asocial attitudes, and daydreaming only furnish 
| the mother with ran added incentive to have her suc- 
ceed in school and in her social contacts. For years 
| she has forced the child to study music even though 
| she is unable to sing a note or to develop an interest 
in the piano, Even now that the school authorities 
_and relatives recognize the child as presenting serious 


132 CONCERNING PARENTS 


problems of a neurotic nature, she clings blindly to 
her belief that the child is normal. 

One sees in this picture a multiplicity of issues in- 
volved. The mother’s own early attachment to her 
father, her conscious hatred of her mother, and her 
intense jealousy of her sister offer potential elements 
of unadjustment which she brings to her responsi- 
bilities as wife and mother. The marital unadjust- 
ment, and the domination of the child, the child’s 
conflict over the allegiance due to her mother, her 
inability to fulfill the ideals set for her by the mother, 
the lack of school and social adjustments, are a few 
of the elements which have entered into Alice’s 
present unadjusted state. 

To treat the child in her own home, under the 
continuous contact with her mother, implies the nec- 
essity of a fundamental change in the mother’s atti- 
tude to bring about a social and emotional integration 
for the child. 

Frequently we find that childhood unhappinesses 
experienced by the parent, such as the early loss of 
a father or mother, the subsequent breaking up of the 
remaining home ties through placement in an insti- 
tution, or the advent of a step-mother or father, may 
create such a sense of insecurity that the parent after 
marriage is prone to emphasize the value of close 
home ties to the exclusion of outside contacts. This 
attitude even reflects itself in the handling of chil- 
dren, sometimes with an unhealthy over-emphasis on 
the fear of disease. 


FROM CHILDHOOD TO YOUTH . 133 


Should the child suffer from an infectious disease, 
the over-sensitive parent finds it difficult not to over- 
stress its seriousness. Through processes of cod- 
dling and babying, not only may he or she 
intensify the wish of the child to remain dependent, 
but in these patterns conceived in love, and fear of 
loss, an habitual overstressing of physical ailments 
may assume an important role for the child, as a 
medium through which he may gain satisfaction and 
attention from the parent. 

The essential destructiveness upon the normal life 
and integration of the family group due to the in- 
compatibility of parents was implied in the case of 
Alice. In this age of divorce, perhaps our attention 
is called more frequently to the destructive factors 
which become active in the lives of the children 
whose mothers and fathers find it no longer possible 
to live together. The conflicting emotional issues 
which are precipitated in the lives of the children 
through the necessity to develop an adherence to one 
or the other parent suggests the importance of pro- 
tecting youngsters from the strain of such an 
adjustment. This situation contains more obvious 
elements of dissatisfaction and irritation for the 
child than we see on the surface of a family group 
where one parent or the other in response to his own 
inability to gain satisfaction from the mate, turns 
to the child as a means of solace. This sort of pat- 
tern is not infrequent and is well exemplified by the 
issues arising in the life of Mary, age nine, who is 


134 CONCERNING PARENTS 


referred because of nervous twitching of the face, 
inability to make good contacts with other children, 
and increasingly poor marks in school. 

The parents of Mary, intelligent, well-educated 
Americans, find themselves isolated from the con- 
tact with their family group because the paternal 
family felt that the mother of our child is beneath 
them socially. Mary’s father, a silent, unsocial man, 
spent a most unhappy childhood with a stepmother 
and half sisters, and finds himself emphasizing the 
importance of keeping Mary’s life a happy one. 
Since the child’s birth, so the mother states, the hus- 
band has transferred all his affection from his wife 
to the child. His fears as to her safety, the demands 
which he places upon his wife “never to let the child 
out of her sight,” the frequent telephone calls each 
day to assure the continuation of this safety pro- 
gram only tend to irritate the mother and to em- 
phasize in her mind the fact that the position she 
holds in the household is the mother to her husband’s 
child. Her reaction to this is naturally colored with 
jealousy and a feeling of thwarting which often 
precipitates minor conflicts between herself and the 
child. The father’s habitual gratification of every 
wish on the part of Mary, except on the occasions 
when she wishes skates or other toys which might 
hurt her, only tends to emphasize the mother’s feeling 
of irritation. The fact that the father is disturbed 
over the slightest scratch, does not wish her to go 
shopping, or to the movies because of possible con- 


FROM CHILDHOOD TO YOUTH © 135 


tamination through contact with the crowd, tends to 
intensify the mother’s isolation. If the child de- 
velops the slightest cold she is taken to the family 
doctor ; the twitching of her face worries the father ; 
he is constantly remarking about it in her presence. 
When he must be away on business for a few 
days he demands that the child write to him every 
day and says that he would go insane if anything 
should happen to her. 

This highly charged emotional atmosphere, the 
constant bickerings between the parents, the recog- 
nition on the part of the child of her position of 
superiority in the household, her impertinence, her 
refusal to comply with her mother’s advice, the nerv- 
ous tic which is obviously a bid for more attention, 
(since physical examinations reveal a healthy child 
with no neurological involvement) again point to the 
necessity of interpreting to the parents the essential 
needs for mental health which the child’s life experi- 
ence demands. ‘To observe that the child is the prod- 
uct of her environmental handling is patent. The 
cure for these unhealthy patterns again reflects the 
need to heal the environmental ills. 

Many other issues which arise in the daily contact 
of parents and children are frequently observed by 
all of us, even among our friends. The over-anxious 
mother who can not get herself to leave the care of 
her child to some one else, the partiality extended to 
one child with the opportunities for dissatisfaction 
and development of unhealthy attitudes for the 


136 CONCERNING PARENTS 


others, the domination of the home by the parent or 
parents through a display of rigid authority, the 
over-emphasis of educational pursuits, the failure to 
understand the problems of unadjustment existing 
in the brother-sister relationships seem to point to 
certain essential needs within this child-parent state 
which have hitherto received too little consideration. 
It is easier to think our child as nervous, or bad, the 
badness perhaps the direct product of so-called in- 
herited traits, rather than to recognize that the main- 
spring of the child’s unadjustment issues directly 
from the emotional ties that bind. This requires 
honesty and courage, a willingness to learn, and to 
admit mistakes on the part of all of us. 

Parents should remember that the child is a puppet 
on the stage of life, set and controlled in the very be- 
ginnings by adults, that the strings which make the 
puppet move are for the most part the wishes and 
desires of the grown-ups, that during its early pe- 
riod of life experience certain patterns of habitual 
reactions are established with their emotional color- 
ings, and that these patterns may make for construc- 
tive integration of the personality as a whole when 
understood and wisely controlled. A wider dissemi- 
nation of this kind of information will make for a 
program of prevention and will tend to assure the 
child of to-day an opportunity to prepare successfully 
for an intelligent, stable, mature parenthood. 


CONFRONTING THE WORLD—THE 
ADJUSTMENTS OF LATER 
ADOLESCENCE 


By FranKwoop FE. Witziams, M.D. 
Medical Director, National Committee for Mental Hygiene 


I HAVE two points that I wish to make.. I hesitate 
to discuss them, however, because each would seem 
to me so obvious that I feel I run the risk of being 
boresome. However, though they would seem to be 
obvious, like most obvious things, they have been 
overlooked almost entirely in our thinking and dis- 
cussion of the subject; and because they have been 
so lost sight of, secondary problems have arisen to 
occupy our attention. These have aroused consid- 
erable heated discussion as there are many differ- 
ences of opinion ‘about some of them, and I risk be- 
ing seriously misunderstood through having the 
obvious points I wish to make caught up and lost in 
the emotions aroused by secondary issues. How- 
ever, the topic is quite too important for one to hesi- 
tate for either of these reasons to discuss it frankly. 

It seems to me that the adolescent, getting ready to 
face the world, has two major problems before him. 
We give him innumerable problems, from learning 

137 


138 CONCERNING PARENTS 


how to dress neatly and speak correctly to passing his 
college entrance examinations. We place great em- 
phasis upon all of these and a host of other prob- 
lems. However, if we will strip away what is 
artificial and what is important merely because we 
make it important—and the importance of things is, 
after all, relative—we get to two issues which face 
every adolescent boy and girl and upon the solution 
of which depends entirely the success of their future 
lives. 

These two problems are, first, emancipation from 
the home, and, second, the establishment of hetero- 
sexuality. Everything in the future depends upon 
the success of the boy or girl in solving these two 
problems. 

In spite of the absolute, fundamental, and primary 
importance of these two things, the home, the school, 
and our social life generally seem to be almost en- 
tirely organized and banded together to defeat, in so 
far as they can, the establishment of these two things. 

In this adolescent boy who until recently has been, 
on the whole, a dutiful, gentle, lovely child, parents 
note with fear and anxiety changes that are taking 
place. There are his increasing gruffness; his lack 
of consideration for others, particularly those of 
whom he has been especially considerate before, his 
mother for instance; the roughening of his language 
through the bringing in of slang and sometimes 
terms that are even more disliked than slang; his in- 
creasing intolerance of other children, particularly 


CONFRONTING THE WORLD 139 


the younger children in the family; his increasing 
secretiveness. He is not so open-hearted as he was 
before; he does not confide as he did before; he 
keeps more to himself, and one is not sure of what is 
Poing on in his mind. This makes the mother very 
anxious. 

He is less given to demonstrations of affection; he 
is inclined to resist advice and to scoff at sentiment; 
he shows a tendency toward bizarre methods of 
dressing, either in the way of wearing old, disgrace- 
ful clothing, or at other times of being decidedly 
over-particular and dandified in his dressing, he de- 
mands more and more money; he is increasingly 
reckless and rude. 

These are things that parents note, as their chil- 
dren enter adolescence, and become much alarmed. 
But in reality the general tendency indicated by all of 
these things is healthy, although the particular forms 
or aspects it may take may not necessarily be healthy 
and certainly are sometimes unwise; the tendency, 
which is the beginning effort on the part of the child 
to emancipate himself from home, is healthy. 

If this tendency does not manifest itself, then in- 
deed parents should become concerned. At the 
present time, however, if the child goes docilely 
through his adolescence, still childishly dependent 
upon his mother, if he is obedient and never gives a 
moment’s trouble or care, if he has his arm simply 
covered with insignia of approval for good deeds, 
then the parents are happy and pleased. Then, fre- 


140 CONCERNING PARENTS 


quently, they might better be thoroughly alarmed— 
clear to the end of their toes. 

As it is, if the boy does begin to show some of 
these emancipating tendencies, the parents become 
anxious. As I have noted, any of these reactions 
may cease to be healthy in itself, may be developed 
to a degree where it no longer represents a healthy 
reaction, but an unhealthy over-compensation; but if 
so, this undesirable over-compensation is due not to 
noral depravity or “original sin,” but to the resist- 
ance to the original healthy tendency that has been 
met with by the child. These three things should be 
kept clearly in mind—the underlying tendency, which 
is sound and healthy; the manifestations of this 
tendency, which bear the same relationship to the 
tendency as do symptoms to a disease, which may 
be annoying and distressing, but which never have 
the same relative importance as the thing itself; 
and finally, the secondary reactions which may be 
even more annoying and distressing and even dan- 
gerous, but which are produced by ignoring the real 
situation and attempting to deal with the symptoms 
of the situation. 

If to the first feeble efforts of the child to eman- 
cipate himself, resistance is raised, a child who is 
healthy mentally and physically will make yet an- 
other and a more vigorous attempt to accomplish his 
objective. His own resistance will increase as the 
resistance he has to meet increases. Misunderstand- 
ing and anger—and heart-ache—enter. If the re- 


CONFRONTING THE WORLD I4I 


sistance mount to the point where the contest 
becomes vulgarized into a pushing and shoving con- 
test, there is likely to be produced, because of the 
misunderstanding of the real significance of what is 
taking place and the consequent unwise resistance 
on the part of parents, a whole host of secondary re- 
actions which are necessary for the child under the 
circumstances, but which are probably not nearly so 
healthy as were the first. The whole issue becomes 
confused. The parents are fearful and anxious. 
They had hoped to raise a gentleman and a scholar 
and they have a rough-neck. The boy is angry and 
rebellious, also puzzled and hurt. Confusion is 
worse confounded, frequently at this point, by a fur- 
ther unwise action on the part of parents. With a 
lack of logic unworthy of a school-child—and the 
point is not missed by the adolescent boy or girl— 
they demand love in payment for sacrifices that have 
grown out of responsibilities they themselves as- 
sumed voluntarily and for their own pleasure, and 
they demand respect as though that were a right that 
came with accidental parenthood. There is some- 
thing ludicrous and pathetic in an angry woman, 
whether wife or mother, demanding love, and some- 
thing pathetic and comic in a childishly angry man, 
who has lost mastery of himself and of a situation, 
demanding respect. These things are not had by 
right. 

Parents need not be fearful of losing the love of 
their children. If they would only understand that 


142 CONCERNING PARENTS 


the love which the children have for them is quite a 
fundamental thing; that it is almost impossible to 
eradicate, even if one wished to do so; that there is 
no desire on the part of the child, in spite of his 
symptoms, to deny this love or to get away from 
it completely, they would be less anxious and their 
emotions would less frequently plunge them into mis- 
takes at critical moments. But they don’t seem to 
know this. They take these symptomatic manifesta- 
tions as real and are fearful. They can drive away 
the love the child has for them or they can change it 
into something quite different and harmful—but they 
can’t lose it. 

Children do love their parents, often even when 
their parents are cruel and unworthy, and when any 
understanding at all or intelligence has been shown 
they respect them. But neither this love nor this re- 
spect should be kept on a childhood plane. Although 
he may not know it, it is against these bonds that the 
adolescent is struggling.. It is a vital matter for him 
and if it becomes necessary he is quite right in put- 
ting up a vigorous resistance. Freeing himself from 
bonds which can only be a handicap in the period of 
his life he is now entering does not imply any real 
lack of respect for father or of genuine affection for 
mother. It is merely that these emotions must now 
be brought to function at an adult level. The child 
must come into control of his own emotional forces. 

This process is as necessary as learning to walk 
and difficulties and dangers are involved. We do 


CONFRONTING THE WORLD 143 


not, however, prevent the child from learning to 
walk for fear it will fall in the fire or down the 
stairs. First shielding it from the fire and the stairs, 
we encourage, urge and guide it. At first it may 
look as if learning to walk as an adolescent involved 
greater danger than learning to walk as an infant. 
Learning to walk involves the possibility of death or 
of serious permanent crippling. This is not so true 
in adolescence though it may appear even more so. 
These possibilities are at times involved, but if par- 
ents will examine closely those activities on the part 
of adolescents which give them such great concern, 
they will find, I think, that seldom is either of these 
dangers involved. At most what is involved—and 
it is this that is the real cause of the concern, al- 
though the parents may not be aware of it—is the 
possible embarrassment and “disgrace’’ to themselves 
growing out of these activities rather than any very 
great likelihood of serious danger to the child. At 
least this is clear—whatever the danger, whether to 
parent or child, the danger in the opposite direction, 
so far as the child is concerned, is surer and greater. 

If this emancipation is resisted unwisely conse- 
quences follow. Either the child gives up in his at- 
tempt—and if so he is lost—or, failing in complete 
accomplishment, he meets the issue by an unhealthy 
over-compensation and cripples himself seriously— 
or he succeeds. 

If the child is successful, his self-respect and con- 
fidence are increased and, once the freedom is gained, 


144 CONCERNING PARENTS 


whatever has been fundamental in the bond of affec- 
tion remains and is healthful and helpful and upon a 
stable and abiding basis. It may no longer be ex- 
pressed in the old ways, as it should not be, but it does 
find healthful and worth-while ways of expressing 
itself. 

Discipline can come only from leadership. Surely 
in all other affairs, aside from parental matters, we 
are seeing this. We no longer believe merely be- 
cause somebody puts himself over us or, by some 
fortuitous circumstances is put over us, that we need 
to abide by his discipline. We follow, as adults in 
the community, those individuals who inspire our 
confidence and our desire to follow them by their 
worthiness of leadership. That is really the only 
kind of discipline that counts, whether it is in a busi- 
ness organization or a military organization or any 
other kind of an organization. You can make people 
goosestep and march if you wish to use a discipline 
of force. You can gain your objective temporarily, 
but it is only a temporary objective you have gained. 
You have not changed anything fundamental at all. 
You have no real discipline, no real control. It can 
be beyond you in a minute. You may compel a boy 
to say ‘‘Yes, sir,” and snap his heels together, in the 
home. It may look pretty but it does not imply that 
he respects you or that he carries any “Yes, sir,” 
spirit into his activities outside the home. Real dis- 
cipline in the home comes because the parents are 


CONFRONTING THE WORLD 145 


capable of leading and are looked to naturally for this 
leadership. Out of this leadership grows discipline. 

What is needed, it seems to me, is a changed atti- 
tude on the part of parents through an understanding 
of what it is that the child is attempting to do and 
an ability to differentiate between what is merely 
symptomatic and what is real and of vital importance 
to the end that parents may cooperate in the vital 
things instead of resisting them. 

Confidence is needed. Not confidence in the child’s 
wisdom or in his ability to cope unaided with the 
complex problems that are facing him, the decisions 
he has to make, but confidence and belief in the right- 
ness of the thing that he is attempting to do. 

The matters of detail and incident can then be 
handled. There will be differences of opinion be- 
tween the child and the parents over the details, but 
these can be satisfactorily dealt with in spite of 
occasional electrical storms if there is confidence be- 
tween these two and understanding at least on the 
part of the parents. 

An adolescent boy is keen for advice. He goes to 
all sorts of places for it—except to his parents. He 
is as puzzled as he can be. His cocksureness has no 
reality in it. He is a very much puzzled, confused 
boy. He wants advice. He is dead against any ad- 
vice that is obviously based upon a profound misun- 
derstanding of the situation and that is either 
lachrymose or threatening. He knows that tears and 


146 CONCERNING PARENTS 


threats are but a sign of weakness. They are not a 
sign of wisdom or of understanding. They affect 
him not at all. 

He is particularly resentful, and rightfully so, of 
any appeal for good conduct on the ground of love 
of his mother. That is a very vital thing with him. 
It is a thing that is troubling him right now. Itis a 
thing the enervating of which he is, in a healthy way, 
trying to get away from, and to appeal to the weak- 
est thing in him, the thing that he is trying to manage 
and get under control, he realizes is wholly unfair; 
while you may force him to capitulate temporarily, 
even permanently, you do him an incalculable injury. 
Love of mother is an instrument of terrible potenti- 
ality. Because by its use we can so easily cow in- 
dividuals into a semblance of proper conduct, we use 
it recklessly. We go further and extol the man who 
shows great devotion to his mother and to the man 
who can weep at the name of “mother” we ascribe 
special virtue. The love of mother is too valuable 
an asset in the life of any man to run the risk of 
turning it into a liability through reckless use. 

A man who is “so good” to his mother is not 
always so good to his wife or so successful in his 
relationships with others; and a man’s life is more 
concerned with his wife and with others than with 
his mother. A wise mother should realize this and 
not demand too much. She should find her happi- 
ness, even though it be a bit wistful, in helping her 


CONFRONTING THE WORLD 147 


boy to launch his life from her own and in seeing him 
strong and able because of her. 

So when there is nothing but misunderstanding, 
profound misunderstanding—which he cannot ex- 
plain, but of which he is very well aware—and a 
lachrymose attitude, and threatening and appeals to 
his weakness when he is striking out for strength, the 
boy resists, as he should. He is said to be obstinate 
and resentful of advice—but he goes elsewhere 
hungry for advice. 

If a boy smashes a car or breaks his collar-bone 
in recklessness or comes home with alcohol on his 
breath, these are not necessarily signs of moral de- 
pravity. They are not, to be sure, desirable things 
in themselves, but they are an expression, even 
though a very awkward and undesirable expression, 
of a tendency that is healthy rather than unhealthy. 

Fainting and weeping mothers or storming fathers 
do not contribute anything at this time, except fur- 
ther to complicate the situation and produce a whole 
round of secondary reactions which may be worse 
than the first and not nearly so healthy. The boy 
really didn’t wish to smash the car. He had no de- 
sire to break his neck. He probably didn’t wish to 
get drunk. However, he was wishing something and 
he was trying to find some sort of an expression for 
it. Here parents can be of help. Even though the 
boy may not know what he is trying to do, they 
should know and with their greater ingenuity and 


148 CONCERNING PARENTS 


experience enable the boy to find a more satisfactory 
expression, 

The important thing is not the particular detail, 
but the tendency. We lose track of the woods be- 
cause of the trees. So absolutely fundamental and 
vital is this emancipation that it were far better that 
we have smashed cars and broken bones and even 
alcohol. on breaths—particularly in view of the 
adolescent circumstances under which these adoles- 
cents have alcohol upon their breaths—than that this 
boy should fail in the objective toward which he is 
directed. 

The extent to which these expressions, unwise, 
awkward, damaging sometimes, will go, will be in 
proportion to the resistance that the boy meets at 
home—that is, if he is mentally and physically 
healthy. The objective will be safely attained in pro- 
portion to the cooperation that the boy obtains from 
the parents. This is a difficult time. Sometimes sec- 
ondary reactions are so confusing that it is hard to 
keep in mind the real issue, but after all if the parents 
are in command of their own emotional forces, they 
will not overlook the woods for the trees and, in- 
stead of being so fearful and so anxious, they will 
be thankful that their adolescent is beginning to 
manifest evidences of a healthy adulthood and ex- 
press their energies in assisting him to his goal. 

They will rightfully be a bit concerned as to just 
what course events are going to take during this 
period of learning to walk, but they will not doubt 


CONFRONTING THE WORLD ‘ 149 


either the process or its necessity. They: will have 
confidence in its rightfulness and in its probable 
eventual success. They will sit not in anxiety and 
fear but—a bit upon the sidelines, not too much in 
evidence, but yet there all the time—they will sit 
observing what is going on, encouraging what is 
going on, and guiding what is going on. 

If they find no tendency on the part of their boy 
or girl to make this emancipation, they will then be- 
come anxious and they will begin to take steps gently 
to shove this backward duckling from the nest. 

Emancipation from the home does not mean leav- 
ing home, renouncing it as if it were something’ 
unworthy and no longer of need, freeing oneself 
from all the relationships and co-relationships and 
community feeling that should exist in an intimate 
group and which can be so valuable, helpful, and 
stabilizing. (One must say should and can here al- 
though one would like to say do and are.) In some 
instances it may mean just this, but it should mean 
no more than the psychological freeing of oneself 
from childish bonds, whether a childish fear and 
undue dominance by father or a childish love and de- 
pendence on mother, or both. The boy cannot suc- 
cessfully face life if weighed down by either of these 
things. He must master both. 

Now as to our second point, the development of 
hetero-sexuality. By hetero-sexuality, we mean a 
healthy, adult level of sexuality in which the primary 
sex interest of the individual is in the opposite sex. 


150 CONCERNING PARENTS 


This is something the child must attain. These two 
problems are, as a matter of fact, very largely one 
problem, but for convenience of discussion, we may 
separate them into two. Over this matter of sex we 
are greatly concerned. Our anxiety, however, is 
rather badly placed: it is not fear that the child may 
fail in accomplishing a healthy development, thereby 
permanently crippling himself in a very serious and 
fundamental way, but fear that in the process un- 
pleasant things may happen, things perhaps of im- 
portance in themselves, but certainly of secondary 
importance to the success of the process itself. With 
failure of the latter, the consequences for the child 
(and society) are inevitable and permanent; with the 
former, the permanence and importance are entirely 
as we choose to make them. So greatly have we 
magnified the importance of some of these secondary 
matters that the home, the church, the school and 
society generally would seem to be banded together 
to defeat the child in attaining a healthy sex devel- 
opment. 

The child up to this period has not been hetero- 
sexual. Its sex life has not been fully developed. 
There are many issues yet to be solved before we 
may know just where on the scale of sexual develop- 
ment it is going to find its place. These adolescent 
years are of the greatest importance. This is the 
one period in the child’s life for this process. The 
one period for what? Certainly it is not the one time 
in life when the contents of high school text-books 


CONFRONTING THE WORLD I5!i 


may be learned or the requirements of college en- 
trance boards satisfied or a dozen and one other re- 
sponsibilities we load upon the adolescent fulfilled, 
but these are the only four or five years that he will 
ever have in all of his life to establish this funda- 
mental thing, his own hetero-sexuality. 

If hetero-sexuality is not accomplished in these 
four or five years it never will be accomplished in a 
normal way. It may be accomplished later by some 
technical interference, but then only after much con- 
flict, failure, and illness. These four or five years 
hold the only chance the average boy and girl will 
have to establish their hetero-sexuality. Once pre- 
vented, it can never come naturally and normally 
again. It is a real problem, therefore, that faces the 
child, in spite of the importance of college entrance 
examinations just ahead that face the parents. 

We tried for a time to protect ourselves and chil- 
dren (it really amounted to an attempt to defeat the 
effort of the child to establish its hetero-sexuality ) 
by keeping them completely ignorant of all sex mat- 
ters. The tragic results of this no one knows quite 
so well as the psychiatrist. Even people generally are 
now awake to the consequences that have followed 
and efforts are not now so commonly made to keep 
individuals in ignorance until the night they are 
married. 

But there are bars we still do put up. Hetero- 
sexuality cannot be attained in a vacuum. It cannot 
be attained by itself. It does not just happen; it is 


152 CONCERNING PARENTS 


a development and growth that is nourished and con- 
tinued by what it feeds upon. Hetero-sexuality will 
be established through contact and experience with 
those of the opposite sex. Anything, no matter for 
what purpose, that tends to make this contact too dif- 
ficult is not in the interest of the child, or the parents 
or society. 

Yet an effort is made, when signs first begin to 
appear that boys and girls are becoming interested in 
each other, to keep them apart. We are so fearful 
that something is going to happen. Nothing—noth- 
ing so tragic could happen as that they should fail 
to accomplish this objective. Nothing! But we are 
so fearful. We lose sight of the importance and the 
necessity of the thing the child is attempting to do 
and lose ourselves in a round of fears over matters 
perhaps of importance in themselves, but certainly 
secondary, with the result that we lose our oppor- 
tunity to guide and protect and to cooperate with the 
child in the development and establishment of its 
hetero-sexuality. In a panic we try to deny it, to 
minimize it, to bar it out, to keep it away. 

Parents attempt to keep girls away from this boy 
or boys away from this girl. If unsuccessful, they 
then attempt very carefully to select the boy or the 
girl with whom their children may have contact. If 
done with real insight and understanding, this may 
be well, but, on the other hand, it would be well to 
let the boy or the girl do a little of the choosing, for 


CONFRONTING THE WORLD 153 


after all it is their psychology that has to be handled, 
not the parents’ psychology. 

The girl or the boy who may satisfy the parents’ 
emotional needs may be entirely unsatisfactory for 
the needs of the boy or girl. While we may well be 
careful here, a great deal of latitude is wise. And 
if we find that our adolescent boy has been out late 
some evening with some one who lives on the other 
side of town and of whom, therefore, we cannot 
thoroughly approve, we may keep a weather eye open 
to this, but we are not justified in “hitting the roof.” 
Without any “harm’’ to himself he will probably have 
learned more in that little contact that will be helpful 
to him than he did at the very nicely supervised dance 
that was given the week before. 

We try to force upon these youngsters very 
unhealthy ideals. Here again I let myself in for mis- 
understanding, but I do not see that it can be avoided. 
Some very unhealthy ideals have grown up in the 
world around this matter of sex, based largely on 
fears coming from a lack of understanding and 
philosophies of life constructed out of ignorance. 
One of the worst is this—the idealization of women 
themselves, the placing of women upon pedestals as 
something too fine, too sacred, too fragile to be 
handled in anything but the most genteel, consid- 
erate way. 

A boy is taught, in the first place, that matters of 
sex are degrading, wrong and sinful (at least for 


154 CONCERNING PARENTS 


him and probably a little bit for everybody), but this 
teaching being not altogether successful, we further 
try to “protect” him by creating in him an attitude 
towards women that we think will make him “safe.”’ 
We teach him that in his consideration of women, he 
must keep in mind his mother and sister; that he 
must not say or think or act in any way with another 
woman that he would not say, think, or act with his 
mother or sister, or want them to know about. 

These are frightfully unhealthy ideas. Tremen- 
dous damage is done by them. Here again nobody 
knows as does the psychiatrist how devasting the 
damage has been to thousands of men and women, 
through this utterly false ideal. Women are not the 
fragile, delicate, sacred little things that they have 
been pictured. Women are human, vigorous indi- 
viduals who can pretty well handle themselves, 

While it is perfectly right to point out to boys 
that under certain circumstances women must be 
carefully guarded and protected, it is wrong to put 
into their adolescent minds at the critical time when 
they are normally, healthfully approaching the de- 
velopment of their hetero-sexuality that women must 
not be thought of in any way except as they would 
think of their mothers and sisters. 

This is one of the chief causes for the failure of 
the establishment of hetero-sexuality on the part of 
the boy which interferes later with his married life, 
which drives him to prostitution, which drives him 
to abnormal sex expression and to those twists and 


CONFRONTING THE WORLD 155 


quirks of personality and character that go deep in 
his life and fundamentally change and frequently 
ruin it. 

Equally unhealthy ideas are foisted upon girls in 
regard to the depravity of men and the great care 
that they must use, therefore, in protecting them- 
selves from the sexual attacks of men. In order to 
“protect” them they are so filled with fears that they 
are seriously handicapped even in everyday social re- 
lationships and their hetero-sexual development, 
necessary in happy marital relations, successful 
motherhood, and all adult social contacts, is defeated. 

Through fears growing out of obviously mistaken 
ideas as to what sort of beings human beings are and 
what our goals in life should be, there has grown 
up a notion that sexual purity is valuable as an end 
in itself. A quality or condition may have a social 
value without being valuable as an end in itself. If 
purity, either of men or women, is useful in keeping 
society properly organized and stabilized, then it has 
a social value, but it does not follow that purity as an 
end in itself is valuable. The value of the first does 
not close the door to a study of the second and when 
we come to separate these, we may find that purity as 
an end in itself may be not only not socially valuable 
but socially harmful to a degree that will surprise us. 

A few years ago a traveling salesman, thirty-nine 
years of age, committed suicide in a rural New Eng- 
land hotel. He left a letter for his mother in which 
he expressed his love for her, his regret at the sor- 


156 CONCERNING PARENTS 


row that what he was about to do would bring to 
her, but explaining that he could not face life and his 
failure any longer. He closed his letter with the sen- 
tence, “Anyway, mother, I remained a pure boy.”’ 
Are we supposed to rejoice at this, to sing hosannas 
over this man’s “victory”? Could anything be more 
tragic than this man’s feeling that the most impor- 
tant thing in his whole life was that he should remain 
a “pure’ man? Would it have been more tragic 
had he not remained “pure’? We cannot rejoice 
over this “victory.”’ We can see in it only the tragic 
frustration, due to a failure to emancipate himself 
from a childish dependence upon his mother and to 
his failure to establish an adult hetero-sexuality, 
which made a normal, healthy home and marital life 
with its train of satisfaction, happiness, and success, 
personal and social, impossible and brought only 
despair, failure and death. 

Purity on this basis is not a fine thing. And in 
our efforts to keep boys and girls pure, let us not 
force upon them a spurious purity which is not 
purity, but a disease. 

Let me reiterate that I am not advocating license, 
or unlimited freedom among adolescents or any other 
group, but I do mean this: that if accidents happen 
in the effort of adolescents to establish their hetero- 
sexuality, the disgrace and humiliation that follow 
are only because we feel it, because we make it so, 
not really. 

There are good, social reasons for guarding care- 


CONFRONTING THE WORLD 157 


fully the developing sex life of adolescents and guard 
them, wisely, we should but if in the difficult process 
through which they are going things do happen, it 
is better that they do and hetero-sexuality be estab- 
lished than that they should not happen and ill health 
and abnormality be the result. I do not say that only 
one of the two things can happen, but if in this highly 
charged situation something does happen, nothing 
really serious has happened until we make it so. 
Parents should keep that in mind. By our present 
methods we frequently offer a child but one of the 
two alternatives. 

When adolescents try to make contacts with each 
other in their fumbling, awkward way, we tend to re- 
gard the whole business either with great suspicion 
or with levity. Instead of seeing the real significance 
and beauty—and there is nothing so beautiful as this 
first romanticism of boys and girls in their groping 
towards an adult hetero-sexual life; there is probably 
no love quite so beautiful, if impermanent, no rela- 
tionship ever later in life quite so charming, quite so 
lovely, quite so un-self-conscious, so spontaneous and 
uncalculating as this—and instead of seeing these 
qualities in it, we degrade it to our own level and see 
only what is common and vulgar. 

You cannot convince these boys and these girls 
that what has been happening within them and be- 
tween them is common and vulgar, for down in the 
depths of their hearts, they know that it wasn’t. 
Never has life seemed so fine or so full of wonder- 


158 CONCERNING PARENTS 


ment, never have things seemed so precious or virtues 
they have been inclined to scorn seemed so desirable, 
never have they felt so generous or so kindly disposed 
as in these new emotional relationships. You only 
alienate and you only defeat your own purposes when 
you try to make base what really has beauty and 
health and naturalness, but which unfortunately can’t 
be freely exercised because of the complex society 
in which we must live. You do not convince the 
child but you can so coerce him as to make him self- 
conscious, secretive and guilty and finally calculating, 
vulgar, base and unhealthy. The opposite attitude 
of taking all too lightly and poking fun at his emo- 
tional experiences is also unfortunate. 

These are some of the bars we have put up to 
defeat the attainment of hetero-sexuality upon the 
part of adolescents. To protect them from mud 
puddles, we cause them to fall into a pit from which 
they cannot dig themselves out. 

In facing the world then, every adolescent, in spite 
of all the complex problems we give him, most of 
which are artificial or only relatively important, has 
only two problems really. One is to emancipate him- 
self from the home, and the other is to establish his 
hetero-sexuality. Upon the success of these two ac- 
complishments will depend all the future relation- 
ships that he will have with men as he goes out into 
the world to deal with men, that he will have with 
women as he meets them about the world; it will have 
much to do with his choice of a profession, much to 








CONFRONTING THE WORLD — 159 


_ do with his success or failure in his profession, every- 
_ thing in the world to do with the success of his mar- 
riage. Upon this will depend also his excellence as 
a parent and as a citizen, his attitude toward public 
- questions such as morals, ethics, religion, and public 
policy, his general efficiency, his mental and physical 
health. 

If he does not accomplish this emancipation and 
this hetero-sexuality, his relationships to men and 
women cannot be upon a normal, healthy basis but 
can only be confused; his marriage can at best be but 
a partial success—most likely a failure, whether 
acknowledged or endured; through his parenthood he 
will distort the life of his children, handicapping 
them as he has been handicapped; as a citizen, his 
attitude on public questions of morals, ethics, reli- 
gion, and public policy will be determined in relation 
to his own unsolved problems rather than from the 
consideration of realities. From such, a sound, satis- 
factory, healthy moral world cannot come. 

So I repeat that the two things that a child must 
accomplish—and these are the only years of his life 
that he has in which to accomplish them—are to 
emancipate himself from the home and to establish 
his hetero-sexuality. 


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TEACHERS AND THE CHANGING 
EDUCATION 


SUGGESTED READING FOR PART IV 


Schools of Tomorrow—John and Evelyn Dewey; Dut- 
tow, IQI5. 

Our Enemy the Child—Agnes DeLima; New Republic, 
Inc., 1925. ; 

Fitting the School to the Child—Irwin and Marks; Mac- 
millan, 1924. 

Education as the Psychologist Sees It—W. B. Pilisbury ; 
Macmillan, 1925. 

Law and Freedom in the School—George A. Coe; Univ. 
of Chicago Press, 1924. 

Psychology of the Junior High School Pupil—Pechstein 
& McGregor; Houghton Mifflin, 1924. 

Special Talents and Defects—Leta S. Hollingworth; 
Macmillan, 1925. 

A Study of the Little Child, A Study of the Primary 
Child, A Study of the Junior Child—Mary Theo- 
dora Whitley; Teacher-Training Ass’n, 1921, 1922, 
1923. 





TEACHERS AND THE CHANGING 
EDUCATION 


Tue keynote of present-day life seems to be 
change. ‘There is the changing home, the changing 
mother, the changing father, the changing family 
life, the changing baby and the changing adolescent. 
If the homes change, the schools must change. If 
the schools change, the homes must adapt themselves 
to the new order. The industrial situation must 
change. Out of all these different changes comes the 
mutual adaptations which are absolutely necessary to 
social harmony. 

The two great situations in which children live 
and are changed are the home and the school. These 
are the two chief places in which learning goes on— 
and parents must come to regard themselves ag teach- 
ers just as ideal teachers tend to become quite like 
parents in the school. 

We are more and more realizing the importance 
of character in the training of children. In the 
schools of former days most of the normal things in 
our present curricula were ruled out, and the effort a 
child made to get them in side issues gave him a bad 
name in the school. At the bottom of the report 
card which the child used to take home each month 
was the word “deportment.” Nobody held herself 

163 


164 CONCERNING PARENTS 


responsible for the deportment of that child. The 
school might hold the parent responsible, and the 
parent might hold the school responsible, but every- 
body held the child responsible. The child suffered 
greatly, of course. 

In the changing school the emphasis should not be 
just upon the three R’s—not just upon the intel- 
lectual child, but also on the child with its emotional 
problems, the child with its health problems. Yet we 
can plan a program of all kinds of experiences and 
miss the keynote. With everything provided for 
the child, the child himself may have no choice of op- 
portunities. This is one of the problems we must 
face. 

Dri Ratty Sahin 
Professor of Education, 
Teachers College, 

Columbia University. 


TRAINING TEACHERS TO SEE 
THE WHOLE CHILD 


By Francis MITCHELL FROELICHER 


President, Progressive Education Association 


PARENTS are growing more dependent upon the 
school for every phase of child development than ever 
before. It used to be a comparatively simple matter 
to have a natural form of discipline. In primitive 
days nature itself took care of the education of chil- 
dren. It was really a question of survival, and if 
the child did the wrong thing he was likely to be 
punished summarily and, as it were, automatically. 
In spite of the many industrial and social changes 
that have taken place since those days, we have 
tended to carry over, perhaps as inherited tendencies, 
the same disciplinary methods that our ancestors 
used many years ago. As a result we have fre- 
quently set up in our homes and schools petty autoc- 
racies where the teacher or the parent, as the case may 
be, is the autocrat, a ruler who does not expect rea- 
sonable activity on the part of the child but simply 
expects obedience. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “The secret of 


education lies in respecting the child.” I believe that 
165 


166 CONCERNING PARENTS 


he came as close to the heart of the matter as any 
one ever has in that very simple remark. Neverthe- 
less, his secret has apparently remained a secret in 
a great many homes and class rooms. We build up 
against children frequently a sort of defensive armor 
to cover up our own weakness, and we resort to pun- 
ishments and to rewards to take the place of the in- 
spiration that we could and should give. 

The heart of the whole matter, as I see it, is the 
project of seeing the child whole, and in order to 
see him whole, we must not only analyze the com- 
ponent parts of his make-up but we must also give 
him the proper atmosphere in which to reveal him- 
self. Otherwise, we have no way of knowing that 
we are studying the boy or girl as he or she really is. 

I should like to indicate a few ways in which half 
a dozen country day schools undertake to study their 
children, 

In the first place, there are the much-discussed in- 
telligence tests. These intelligence tests, if they are 
considered as a final authority, have very little valid- 
ity and very little value in school work. It has been 
demonstrated time and again that those who have 
low intelligence quotients may yet be successful in 
life. The only thing that they measure with any 
degree of accuracy is the ability of the child to do 
school work, and this has been especially well dem- 
onstrated at Columbia University where the correla- 
tion between the entrance intelligence examinations 
and the subsequent work of the student is very high, 


TRAINING TEACHERS TO SEE WHOLE CHILD 167 


as opposed to the lack of correlation between the 
college entrance board examinations and the subse- 
quent work of the students. In a school, however, 
it does not seem to me especially profitable to use 
these tests asa measure. They should rather be used 
for diagnostic purposes. 

There are three great fields in the process of learn- 
ing. One of these is the acquisition of new material, 
and in giving the Terman Revision of the Binet in- 
dividual test to a child we can determine with a fair 
degree of accuracy whether or not the child has a 
weakness in this first of the three main departments 
of learning. If he has, we can subsequently throw 
him into situations where he is likely to develop this 
ability and thereby make himself a better student and 
a more efficient person. 

The second of these fields is the retention of old 
material, or memory, as we know it. These two, of 
course, are closely allied, and the way by which im- 
provement may be secured is through association. In 
the acquisition of new material it is obvious to all of 
us, either parents or teachers, that it is essential for 
the child always to connect the new with the old, 
otherwise it will lack warmth and intimacy; it will 
seem something alien, something apart, something to 
be forgotten. The same thing is true with reference 
to retention of material. Unless we have a definite 
classification into which to put our new information 
we are not likely to keep it for a very long time. 

The third of these fields is the logic or the 


168 CONCERNING PARENTS 


reasoning ability of children, which may be fairly 
accurately judged through such a test as that of 
losing the ball on the Binet scale. This latter ability, 
I must confess, we have had no success in improving. 
It seems to be more fundamental, more an inherited 
thing, whereas the other two seem to be matters 
rather of acquisition. 

There is a great deal of giving tests without fol- 
lowing them up or putting them to any particular 
use. This would seem to me a waste of time. It is 
as though you called in a physician and he found 
your temperature was, say, 103 and you filed away 
that figure for future reference, statistical reference, 
perhaps. As a matter of fact, if we find anything 
out, it is essential that we should put it to immediate 
use, otherwise it is useless. 

The same thing is true of the giving of standard- 
ized tests; such as the Stamford Achievement Test, 
which is probably the best test of its kind available 
at the present time. These tests tend to give us in- 
formation about the knowledge that children possess 
at a given point. They may be used for diagnostic 
purposes, for an entire group of children, and they 
may be analyzed down to the individual child, 
thereby adding another element to the component 
parts that go to make up the whole child. 

I should perhaps have mentioned health first, but 
health in this day and age is taken for granted. If 
it is not, of course, there is a serious lack in the home 
or in the school, or both. We have learned to realize 


TRAINING TEACHERS TO SEE WHOLE CHILD 169 


what an enormous waste of time some children have 
gone through simply because of some easily remedied 
defects in eyesight or hearing or in an adenoid or 
tonsil condition. It should now go without saying 
that every school should provide a thorough physical 
examination at least twice every school year, and that 
the home be informed at once of any defects noted 
in children and these defects followed up until they 
are remedied. 

Those to me are the three important elements 
bearing upon the first phase of the complete child. 
Then we have a vastly more important thing— 
namely the character of the child. This has been 
dealt with in various ways, but without a great deal 
of success. We cannot place or at least we have not 
placed this factor in the curriculum. We think that 
we have so much to do without it that we have no 
time for it. 

As a matter of fact, we can make complete studies 
of the characters of children and use these studies 
with a certain degree of objectivity. In the schools 
under discussion we have what we call “Subjective 
Judgments.” We take, on the one hand, a half dozen 
social and moral characteristics such as honesty, self- 
control, consideration, etc. We take a half dozen 
characteristics shown in school work, such as inter- 
est, industry, concentration and perseverance. We 
have divided each one of these characteristics into 
five different classes and graded each one of our 
children individually upon each characteristic. 


170 CONCERNING PARENTS 


It is quite a difficult task and requires a great deal 
of time because no judgment is entered upon a child’s 
card unless it is the composite judgment of at least 
three teachers who know that child intimately. 

Take, for example, the quality of honesty, which 
is fairly simple to classify. If we give a child a 
“one,”’ let us say, on a scale of one to five, in honesty, 
it means just this—that he is honest not only in his 
property relations but is absolutely straightforward 
in all of his social relationships. You would have 
from one to two out of every fifty children who 
might qualify for this group, hardly more than that. 

Group two would be those who are honest in 
property relationships but who may sometimes evade 
or excuse themselves and not meet an issue squarely. 
Group three would be those who are careless of prop- 
erty rights in minor things such as pencils, papers, 
erasers, etc. Group four would be another entirely 
distinct group—those who have an uncertain idea of 
honesty and who are more ashamed of being caught 
than they are of the act itself. That, fortunately, is 
a relatively small group. Fifth would be the reverse 
of one,—those who are deliberately dishonest. 

These character ratings have a great deal of value. 
If you analyze the card of a child with respect to 
these things, you can frequently put your finger ex- 
actly on the point where the troubie lies and throw 
him into situations where he will subsequently be 
able to develop his weaknesses into strength. 


TRAINING TEACHERS TO SEE WHOLE CHILD I7I!I 


I do not mean to advocate these for a moment as 
comparable in any way with the personal influence, 
the inspiration and the leadership that a fine teacher 
can have with the student or with a group of stu- 
dents, but that, after all, completely lacks objectivity. 
We cannot all know all phases of a child, and this 
very device of which I am speaking makes all of us 
associated in a school think of children in terms of 
character, in terms of these emotional and personal 
handicaps and the difficulties through which they are 
going. 

There is just one other thing that might be added 
to this list of seeing the child whole. I refer to the 
use of home reports for children,—blank cards 
which are sent home and on which parents mark their 
own children, returning the cards to the school for 
our use. 

Parents quite frequently hesitate to rate their own 
children. They realize, for the first time, that they 
have not been thinking of their children in terms of 
character, in terms of growth, and if it does nothing 
else it brings them into a closer codrdination with the 
ideals of the school. It might be supposed that 
parents would mark their children extremely high 
and would regard them at least on paper as paragons 
of virtue. This has not been our experience. In 
fact, it has been rather the reverse. They are rather 
afraid of appearing to over-estimate their children 
and generally they under-estimate them, which of 


172 CONCERNING PARENTS 


course is a help to us. Our own estimates are fre- 
quently modest because we want to get at the heart 
of the matter. 

When we find a totally different reaction at home 
from the reaction of the child at school, and where 
the reaction seems to be better at home than in the 
school we can frequently get sound advice on how to 
improve our methods with a given child. The re- 
verse of that is also true. When we find the reac- 
tion is better in school than it has been at home, 
parents sometimes learn from us. 

These seem to me to be the main factors that go 
to make up the whole child. One other thing is 
essential,—namely, an atmosphere where a child will 
reveal himself fully and naturally. Our tendency is 
to view life and learning as a dualism. When chil- 
dren come to school, we say, “Now you are going 
to undertake something else. This is something re- 
mote and different from your child play. Here you 
are in school. At home you can have your normal 
life but here you are going to have something that 
is different.” I don’t know why we should do this. 
The sooner we can do away with this tendency the 
better off we shall be. 

Is there any reason why we cannot take children 
from the home into the kindergarten by a perfectly 
articulated scheme that makes the kindergarten ap- 
pear to the children a perfectly normal development, 
an enlargement of the opportunities to live and grow 
that they have already had? The same thing holds 


TRAINING TEACHERS TO SEE WHOLE CHILD 173 


true all the way through the curriculum of the school. 

Take, for example, such a simple matter as the 
introduction of history or geography. We know 
that at least there is some truth in the theory that 
development of the individual parallels that of the 
race. We find that children in the kindergarten, first 
and second grades, are interested in action, in imagi- 
nation stories. They become fascinated in the first 
and second grades with tales of primitive people, and 
by the time they come to the third grade where they 
ordinarily begin the study of geography, we can 
safely introduce them to the hero tales of early 
Greece and Rome. 

If they go from interest to interest in this fashion 
and begin to involve themselves in the hero stories 
of Greece and Rome, before they realize it, almost 
before we are conscious of it, they will become sensi- 
ble of a new element in their lives, something that did 
not occur to them in fairy stories, nor extensively in 
stories of primitive life. This is a sense of location, 
which leads them naturally into the field of geog- 
raphy. A little later, as a rule, comes the temporal 
sense. They begin to feel that certain activities took 
place at one time and certain activities at another 
time, and before they consciously turn themselves to 
the name “History” they are studying history. 

Instead of handing out to them, the first week of 
school in the third grade, a big, flat geography and 
saying, “Now open your books to page 9, read 
columns I and 2 and answer the questions on page 


174 CONCERNING PARENTS 


ten,” isn’t it a more reasonable way to have them 
come into these things for themselves? Their keen- 
ness of interest is far greater. 

I mention in passing the problem of rewards and 
punishments. It would seem to me that we might 
well do away with practically all rewards and pun- 
ishments now inherent in the scheme of the school. 
This is equally true at home. Probably a great many 
people who should know better have offered their 
children a five-dollar bill for good marks or some- 
thing of that kind. It is a great temptation to offer 
rewards at home as well as in school, but just as soon 
as we do that we take out the interest that lies in- 
trinsically in any activity. 

If we have a set of books, a gold medal or a cash 
prize in the offing as a reward for serial reading or 
something of that kind, instead of being interested 
in that serial reading and interested merely from 
the value one could derive from such a process, the 
child fixes his eye naturally on the prize. That is 
the end of it as far as learning is concerned. 

In matters of punishment I think the thing is 
equally true. If the teacher punishes a child specifi- 
cally for a given act, makes him write something 
one hundred times or stay an hour after school, that 
punishment may have some effect upon the attitude 
of that particular child toward that particular teacher, 
temporarily, but I doubt very much whether it has 
any effect at all upon the fundamental character of 
the child. That, after all, is what we want. We 


TRAINING TEACHERS TO SEE WHOLE CHILD I175 


must deal with children on a reasonable basis because 
this is an age of reason and no longer an age of 
blind punishment and force. 

There is just one other thing I want to mention in 
conclusion. That is the question of expression. I 
believe that we formulate our opinions only as we 
express them. Most of us are content to go around 
day after day with various half-formulated, hazy 
ideas in our minds, and unless we are called upon 
under the stress of necessity to express these ideas, 
to focalize this fringe, we are likely to lose those 
ideas permanently. 

This is especially true of children. They find it 
difficult enough to express themselves when they are 
required to. If we do not give them opportunity 
they are likely to avoid it altogether. Our tendency 
has been to cut down expressiveness and require 
reading of children. We are making them critics of 
life before they have begun to live. 

It is certainly a vital matter to have constantly in 
a school an atmosphere of learning rather than teach- 
ing. You can almost always tell good teaching by 
its unobtrusiveness, by the fact that the teacher is 
relatively quiet and the children are doing most of 
the talking and are carrying out most of the activity. 

I do not mean that this business of expression 
should be carried to the extreme that it has been car- 
ried by certain radical people, where the mere pres- 
ence of pandemonium is regarded as an indication of 
growth; but within reasonable bounds I believe that 


176 CONCERNING PARENTS 


we should constantly throw children into situations 
where they can express themselves fully. There is 
no novelty in the theory at all. If we could all go 
back and teach the way Socrates taught Plato, or that 
Plato taught Aristotle, we should be just as progres- 
sive in most respects as the most progressive person 
is to-day. 

To summarize, the “whole child” j is made up of 
several component parts, the most important of 
which are intelligence from the standpoint of learn- 
ing, health, knowledge, and character. If we can 
analyze these phases of a child’s life and provide a 
favorable atmosphere in which he may live and grow 
in a natural, unrepressed way, I believe that our chil- 
dren will be tolerant and sympathetic and will go 
forward from us with a keen spirit of research, which 
is the finest. thing that we can give to children. 


THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE GROUP 


By W. T. Root, Pu.D. 


University of Pittsburgh 


THE agencies to destroy individuality multiply 
daily. As jolly round red Mr. Sun stirs in the East 
we arise as one man to take our daily dosage of 
bran flakes, syndicated news and funnies. Then in 
a sort of mad tarantella we dance to the thousand 
incidental suggestions of modern congested city life. 

Standardized usages, standardized tests, standard- 
ized curriculums, standardized reading lists for 
every grade, standardized styles, standardized inter- 
ests, standardized current thought (Loeb and Leo- 
pold, the Stillman Case, the Dayton Trial, the 
World Series), Brisbanized daily meditations, highly 
standardized and synchronized manias of all sorts— 
the best-seller mania, everybody drive a car nowhere 
furiously and return, everybody play golf, everybody 
solve cross-word puzzles, everybody play bridge, 
everybody eat Alaska, everybody put on stiff straw 
hats exactly alike at exactly the same time and dis- 
card them on the appointed day regardless of weather 
or dictates of comfort or utility, everybody sing the 
one song that has attained the most sublime vacuity 

177 


178 CONCERNING PARENTS 


in intellectual, esthetic and emotional expression, 
with millions of radios, pianos and victrolas belching 
it in discordant and non-synchronized unison, every- 
body say, “I’m gypped” at least sixty times a day, 
everybody play mah jong, everybody see ‘“Abie’s 
Irish Rose,” and so on. 

Then we needs must standardize even the physical 
expression, as witnessed in the standardized bob, 
standardized complexion, standardized Egyptian or 
Mongolianized eyebrows, and so on. When jolly 
round red Mr. Sun has ceased to annoy our receiv- 
ing set, some fifty millions of us retire as one man, 
adjust our ear pieces and take our last standardized 
dosage. Could we but dream a standardized dream 
some Freudian expert could radio us our standard- 
ized complex during breakfast,—provided, of course, 
it could pass our anointed, divinely self-appointed, 
standardized moral censors. Plays are not sup- 
pressed because they are immoral but because they 
cannot be classified under the highly standardized 
permissible immoralities. Never indulge in individ- 
ualized immorality, this is the unpardonable sin. 
But this is enough of the facetious,—about a matter 
that should make us weep. 

It is clear to every one that one of the most baf- 
fling problems of progressive education for both 
parent and teacher is the de-individualizing of the 
personality by the increasing agencies which bring 
about ever and ever greater mass suggestibility, 
crowd action and social imitation. One would nat- 


THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE GROUP 179 


‘urally expect education to develop rationality and 
individuality to off-set the shallow, infantile emo- 
tionalism and uncritical suggestibility of the group- 
mind. But we find to our alarm that the well-to-do, 
during the last ten years, have gradually deserted the 
cause of general education, seeking personal relief 
in the private school. Meanwhile the group in the 
public school class has grown larger, and administra- 
tive routine has become more highly standardized 
and deplorable. It behooves us then, to consider the 
individual in the group. 

For logical reasons we may consider the subject 
under five headings: (1) The socializing of the in-: 
dividual by the group; (2) the pseudo-socializing 
of the individual by the group; (3) keeping individ- 
ual integrity, that is, personality; (4) individualized 
activities within the group, having in mind the re- 
vamping of our traditional ideas in the pedagogy of 
learning. It is this rather uninteresting and prosaic 
topic I wish to discuss most in detail. Fifth and 

finally, I want to touch on the type of teacher needed 
— to make any program of individualization a success. 

It seems desirable, first of all, to emphasize the 
excellent characteristics of the group influence and 
to look at the matter group-wise. It is obvious that 
beginning with brothers and sisters at home and dur- 
ing the early days of the kindergarten, the child ex- 
periences a wholesome check to the natural selfishness 
of helpless infancy and the exaggerated tenderness 
of mothers. He learns to share, to take his turn, also 


180 CONCERNING PARENTS 


at times to demand his turn, to cooperate, to estimate 
others shrewdly, to enter into the esprit de corps, to 
sharpen his wits as a social-survival necessity, to 
curb all sorts of tantrums at the risk of social dis- 
approval, to barter cleverly in compromise (a neces- 
sary evil of social adaptation), to do team work, to 
lie by facial expression (a most precious social 
asset), to bluff, to take his feelings off his sleeve, to 
hold his own in a mob (absolutely essential for the 
bargain-counter, the stock exchange, or the subway), 
to observe the social amenities, to think in the pres- 
ence of others, to keep his head and his temper and 
harden his emotions in the competitive scramble, to 
know whom to trust and soon. From kindergarten 
to university, from contact with brothers and sisters 
to life in a fraternity, from the fire-drill to the hy- 
steria of the foot-ball field he learns something, use- 
ful vocationally and socially. He will make many 
priceless adaptations even when left to make them 
uncritically and without any logical poise or social 
estimates of relative values. It is the part of educa- 
tion, however, to train one to evaluate social settings, 
to be in them but not of them. 

But there are some unfavorable aspects of the 
socializing of the individual. Social suggestion is a 
tremendous stimulus but it is quite as often a poison 
as a food. Mob intimidations of all sorts lead to 
social imitations, against the better judgment, to the 
detriment of the individual and to the ultimate 
damage of the group. Keeping up with the Jones, 





THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE GROUP . ISI 


gangs, styles, fear of social criticism, school spirit, 
fads, all such, coerce and deprive the individual 
within the group of the independent judgment nec- 
essary to preserve personal integrity, without his 
knowing the cause of coercion. For administrative 
ease, much time is spent in schools getting group 
spirit; little time is spent in creating resistance to 
group spirit. School spirit and athletics are good 
within bounds; dangerous when all perspective is 
lost. Individual judgment is likely to perish before 
propaganda and mob suggestion. Education has 
failed which does not train to resist either overt men- 
tal intimidation, or the unconscious yielding to group 
dictation. Closely related is the inane acquiescence 
to whatever is vogue; expressed in “Boost! Don’t 
be a knocker !”” 

Philosophically the mental attitude seems to be a 
sort of cross or hybrid between a hedonistic diathesis 
and vicious opportunism. To be sure, education 
should train one to make compromises and to co- 
operate even when disagreeing, but equally surely 
maudlin, indiscriminate boosting (class, school, po- 
litical, national, civic pseudo-enthusiasm) is the 
worst possible training, leading to intellectual ob- 
scurantism. The uncritical mob tyranny cultivated 
in many school rooms is the most uneducative thing 
imaginable. As life becomes more highly standard- 
ized, more highly mechanized, the danger of uncriti- 
cal coercive crowd suggestion increases. The more 
indirect, the more all-pervasive, the more uncon- 


182 CONCERNING PARENTS 


sciously it is accepted, the more difficult becomes the 
problem of teaching individual independence in 
thought and action. Teachers as a whole have ac- 
cepted the technique of propagandas of all sorts 
rather uncritically and as good. This is not so, the 
reverse being nearer the truth. Experience within 
the group has some excellent socializing properties; 
it presents an ever-increasing number of pseudo- 
socializing possibilities, which in their immediate ac- 
tion destroy individuality and remotely the well- 
being of the group. 

Let us turn to the third consideration: keeping 
individual integrity, that is personality. There are, 
of course, the delightful, naive originalities of the 
child. In so far as possible his way of saying a 
thing, his comparisons, his modes of speech should 
be preserved. Many clerical and factual things ad- 
mit of no individuality, therefore, in all. possible 
things permit the greatest diversity in choice, ex- 
pression, interest and activity. In the field of esthet- 
ics, especially, we cannot command. We cannot say 
to another, “This you must like,”—“This you must 
see as beautiful.”’ His likes and dislikes are not at 
our beck and call. If we have the power we may 
coerce him into acquiescence or assent,—never into 
subjective acceptance. About all we do is to intim- 
idate him into silence, but he keeps his own counsel. 
The minute we have lost the confidence of the child 
we may never again know what his real likes are, his 
air-castles, his preferences, what he really enjoys or 


THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE GROUP . 183 


thinks beautiful. The first stage in de-individuali- 
zation is well under way—I mean, fear of our 
opinions without change in intent or ideal or desire. 

If we would keep the integrity of personality we 
must keep independence in personal taste and esthet- 
ics. The teacher must continually ask herself such 
questions as these: Does the child fear mass disap- 
proval? Am I cultivating thoughtless yielding to 
mass suggestion? Do I encourage individuality in 
ideas, in amusements, in esthetics, in the expenditure 
of leisure time? Have I cultivated sufficient intellec- 
tual independence in the child for him to “want in- 
telligently”? (That is, will he govern his wants by 
his real needs, or will he permit suggestion, adver- 
tisement, and the intimidation of the group to dictate 
purchase, taste and want?) Will we, as the teachers, 
be intelligent enough to let him be intelligent enough 
to follow his vocational and avocational interest with 
the mental poise to be serenely ignorant of many 
things in geography, history and a_ thousand 
“ologies,” all of value but too much for one small 
life? All these are valid questions to test our ability 
in relation to the individual. 

One of the most unfortunate effects of the group 
due to the fact that learning is continually done in the 
presence of the class, is the development of attitudes 
of fear, timidity, stage-fright and negative self- 
feeling. Let us take just one item: say timidity. 
Picture to yourself an elementary reading class. 
There are fifty children. One teacher to teach them 


184 CONCERNING PARENTS 


to read! Some come with an English vocabulary of 
five words, some with five hundred words, some 
come with a vocabulary of five thousand words. 
With some there is keen clear-cut imagery rich in 
detail, with some the imagery has very little qualita- 
tive concreteness. No human mind can retain even 
the important individual differences in so large a 
group, The mind seeks a standard. The teacher 
comes to carry a mental picture of a generic child on 
which she plasters first grade reading or fifth grade 
geography. What she sees before her is a prototype, 
a composite child, a sort of first grade mannikin. 
Perforce she deals in averages and perforce she is 
curriculum-minded. The child is an undifferentiated 
object to which, at which, into which, before which 
or perhaps still better, in front of which the curric- 
ulum is. to be spasmodically and systematically per- 
formed. 

It is often a sharp, rasping, metallic, carefully 
timed, so-many-pupils-per-minute technique. Can it 
be otherwise? One of the little mannikins is Freddy 
—timid, slow of speech, a slight stammer, a good 
comprehension—easily confused. Row by row, aisle 
by aisle, the mannikins pop from their seats, each 
respectively reads his appointed line. Five more, 
three more, one more and it is now Freddy’s turn. 
He is so frightened. His little heart pounds. He says 
something. There is a sharp impersonal criticism. 
To him it seems intensely personal. The next day he 
counts with dread, three more, two more, one more 


THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE GROUP 185 


—the awful ordeal again with fluttering heart. One 
day he is the butt of a witticism—the whole class 
titters. Before long he has formed the habit of care- 
fully counting the lines and the classmates to recite. 
Thus he can predict his time and perfect his little 
stunt. One day he counts incorrectly. He is so in- 


tent getting his line perfected, he fails to hear Mary 


(just ahead of him) read it. He gets trimmed for 
fair on this occasion. In time, fear, dislike, nega- 


tive self-feeling, habitual timidity, destroy every 





atom of self-confidence, joy in school work, or feel- 
ing of power, pleasure or interest in learning to read. 
He comes to feel he is queer, dumb, unlike others. 
He tells no one. In time he even forgets those hours 
of terror, that hell of embarrassment. But the set 
of the nervous system has a better memory. In 
adult life, he retains a fear in the presence of others 
—an overmastering dread in committee or public 
meeting. He has a fear-complex. He has a self- 


_ depreciation complex out of all keeping with his in- 


telligence, native judgment and common sense. 
Often he would willingly sell himself for three cents 
a pound on the hoof, to quote from a recent story 
of Mary Roberts Rinehart. 

Another child saves himself from self-contempt 
by taking refuge in superiority and indifference to 
school demands and public criticism. Another, 
somewhat lazy, and not at all sensitive is lashed into 
a certain degree of effort by criticism before the 
group and is perhaps benefited. Another, quick and 


186 CONCERNING PARENTS 


possessing a certain poise in recitation, cuddles in 
the downy nest of teacher’s approval and finds the 
recitation a greatly exciting, ecstatic, stimulating 
spiritual event in which the ego expands with Freddy 
for a foil. And thus it is that emotionally what is 
one child’s food is another child’s poison. Some 
children stand the gaff of hurried stock criticisms 
publicly administered. The majority are whipped 
and bullied mentally, into a subservient attitude. As 
they make a grade advance, they lose in critical judg- 
ment, originality of expression, increase in mob-sug- 
gestibility, and become timid and colorless in their 
preferences. All this is patent—all this is lamented 
and is the direct product of our continued use of 
group, gang or mob spirit to whip the individual 
into inconsequential conformities. 

I wish now to discuss a little more in detail the 
problem of the individual’s needs in relation to the 
pedagogy of learning. During the last ten years I 
have had a chance to watch the growth of experi- 
mental education and I feel that the failure to clarify 
the problem of individual needs has been largely due 
to muddled ideas regarding learning. So-called 
(often correctly-called) soft pedagogy is merely a 
vague resentment against indiscriminate rote learn- 
ing without any clearly defined issues. 

Pedagogically speaking, learning may be classified 
under four headings: rote learning; associative, log- 
ical or rational learning; cramming; and reference 


THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE GROUP 187 


learning. Let us consider these four types in rela- 
tion to the individual and the group. 

Rote learning, blind, brutal and inspired by the 
birch rod was one of our early inheritances along 
with the New England conscience and the attempt to 
develop the moral fiber. Soft pedagogy was a re- 
bellion against this, the cry being to have the child 
rationalize. But common sense as well as psychol- 
ogy agree that many things of a clerical and factual 
nature need to be automatized. The four processes 
in arithmetic, the irregular verbs, interalphabeting 
from a to z and from z to a, certain well standard- 
ized lists of spelling words, the basic technique on 
piano or violin, precision on the typewriter, the me- 
chanics of punctuation, the writing habit,—all such 
must be acquired by frequent repetition, with accu- 
racy, over a long period of time, usually with short 
crisp work periods. I fear that where every resource 
of pedagogy has been exhausted there will still be a 
residue of long tedious hours of monotonous drill 
for even the gifted child. 

Accurate habit is slow in formation and the ac- 
cumulated techniques of centuries are tangled and in- 
volved. It is here that mass teaching and group drills 
can be made to liven the work. Speed and accuracy 
drill with good-natured group-competition proves, at 
times, a most effective method of teaching. There 
will be, of course, many individual differences even 
in rote material calling for small special groups or 


188 CONCERNING PARENTS 


private instruction. Violin, piano, voice, art and a 
little later vocational and avocational needs all re- 
quire special rote memories. Let me illustrate with 
spelling. We have minimum lists for the different 
grades. This is good and gives us a clearly defined 
and carefully selected basic spelling requirement. 
But the aim of education is not to secure the mini- 
mum essentials but the maximum of diversified con- 
tent. Consequently, even in so simple a thing as 
spelling, we cannot talk of a sixth grade spelling list 
or a fifth grade list as having satisfied the require- 
ments of the individual fifth or sixth grade child re- 
spectively. Briefly, I have no objection to any mini- 
mal list but it must remain a servant to the individ- 
ual needs. Mass teaching, the standardized lists and 
the generic psychologic child continually cause the 
teacher to think in minimal, uniform rote procedures. 
These are all bad in so far as they have a sacred 
priority over the peculiar individual rote memory 
needs. 

Few things should be learned by rote. Anything 
_ so classified should be compelled to “show cause” for 
such classification. Still more rigorous considera- 
tion is needed if we are to compel all children to 
learn this subject matter irrespective of the ‘personal 
equation or the individual need. 

Cramming results when we place so much material 
on the rote list that the child is unable to handle it. 
Then he crams—exudes—forgets—takes another 
subject. Crams—exudes—forgets. 


THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE GROUP 189 


A fairly perfect illustration may be found from 
the sixth grade through the university, medical 
schools being the worst offenders unless it is the oral 
doctorate examination. It is humbug for any one 
to pretend that any one thinks any one will ever 
retain this mass of crammed material. A large por- 
tion of examination-crammed stuff has no justifica- 
tion as rote material for the whole group, often none 
for any member of the group. Cramming is usually 
a mass or group exercise—as such it is seldom justi- 
fied. 

One of the chief reasons why we have so much 
difficulty in individualizing the instruction in the 
group is the failure of the teachers to clarify in their 
own minds just how much of the curriculum matter 
needs learning in any rote way—that is so it can be 
said with books closed. The popular preparation for 
the recitation is an immediate memory cram of semi- 
rote character. 

I believe that a careful study will show that little 
of this is required by the whole group and less in 
individual cases. Take geography: there is so little 
that needs to be done with the book closed. The 
growth of cities, channels of trade, products and so 
on rest on generalizations and rational deduction. 
The favorite questions of final examinations in geog- 
raphy calling for the location of miscellaneous places, 
capitals, ports, rivers, etc., are quite without merit. 
Most of these facts belong to the field of referential 
learning ; namely, one should know how to use maps, 


Igo CONCERNING PARENTS 


guides, atlases, indices, encyclopedias, world al- 
manacs and so on, so as to find the desired informa- 
tion, and having found it be able to use it. That’s 
all. But just so long as we are obsessed with the 
idea that the majority of school-book facts must be 
conned and produced from memory with the book 
closed, just so long we will make little progress. It 
would be much more to the point, permit much 
greater individual adaptation within the group, and 
be much closer to adult practice and common sense, 
to examine the child by observing him go about the 
finding and briefing of any reasonably important 
topic with all the books and maps and materials at 
his disposal. 

When we have the courage to cut loose from all 
the traditional memorizations in geography, history 
and literature that are done with the books closed, 
we will find that much that makes for group regi- 
mentation will have vanished. The peril of the in- 
dividual in the group is largely due to the absolutely 
artificial concepts on the part of the curriculum- 
makers as to what a child should know in any rote 
or semi-rote way. Just the minute we clarify our 
own minds as to what shall be learned by rote, what 
shall be crammed for immediate perspective, what 
shall be learned in its logical associations, and what 
shall be left to referential memory, that minute we 
shall find ourselves clear of much that makes mass 
teaching incompatible with the best interests of the 
individual within the group. 


THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE GROUP IgI 


Now returning to the child. The vast amount of 
what we have inserted in the traditional written ex- 
amination and drill is relatively valueless for recall 
—is at best reduced to a state of psuedo-retention 
called cramming and vanishes from disuse in adult 
life. Were most of this essential to success, the 
most successful people would be failures, for they 
have forgotten it, and the more successful and indi- 
vidualized they have become, the more they have for- 
gotten in the interest of their specialty, which is re- 
tained by use and not by periods of cramming. 

Just as soon as we shake ourselves free from the 
conventional demands regarding what a child shall 
know, we will take the whole matter much more 
leisurely and cease to worry about definite rigma- 
roles that must be memorized in the different sub- 
jects. At once we may cater more freely to the indi- 
vidual within the group. There will be, immediately, 
more time for the perfection of the essential rote 
technique ; there will be more individual assignments. 

The fear of the conventionalist that we will have a 
soft pedagogy is unfounded. If the teacher has a 
clear concept of the years of repetition with accuracy 
necessary for the essential techniques, there will be 
nothing soft in the process. An interest in a cer- 
tain subject-matter will, in an individual case, mean 
neglect elsewhere. What of it? <A child spending 
two hours a day at the piano may have but a nominal 
interest in the number of hogs butchered yearly in 
Kansas City. The whole attitude in the assumption 


192 CONCERNING PARENTS 


of general miscellaneous rote knowledge of fact (al- 
ways on tap) is pretty well saturated with hypocrisy. 
If one knows enough to be intelligently ignorant he 
frankly confesses he doesn’t know without shame 
and without allowing any assumption that he should 
be a world almanac. Actually no one does retain 
non-used facts very long. It sounds pretty to pre- 
tend we know the geographical, historical, literary 
and classical illusions in an address or essay. As an 
actual fact we infer the meaning of the reference 
from the context and from some hazy stereotype as 
to its application and let it go at that. It is in the 
long run nothing but pretense when we affect a mem- 
ory for a miscellaneous assortment of facts. We do 
not remember them. We surreptitiously look them 
up. Why not admit it? 

Every now and then some one, on the basis of 
achievement tests or questionnaires, waxes appalled 
at the ignorance of some eighth grade or high school 
graduating class. Why should any one want to know 
the list of miscellaneous questions asked? Facts in 
themselves do not produce memory capacity or a for- 
mal discipline beyond the facts involved. It would 
be much more to the point first to find the individ- 
ual’s interest and then give him the sources of in- 
formation to see if he could find, select, digest, and 
apply these facts. The majority of facts called for 
in school examinations are of transient duration be- 
cause they are contingent upon use which is never 
forthcoming. Hypocrisy causes us to affect much 


THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE GROUP 193 


knowledge, and common sense and gumption cause 
us to look up facts as we need them. 

Let us then revamp our whole idea of what we ex- 
pect a child to learn and remember. All that is re- 
quired is for us to throw off high-brow sham and 
face the fact that the real obstacle to securing indi- 
vidual flexibility within the group lies in the tradi- 
tional curriculum, is due to the failure to classify the 
different materials from the pedagogy of memory 
into rote, associative, cramming and reference. At 
present we demand perfect recall for a vast number 
of facts that in practice eventually sink to the level 
of vague recognition and are revived by the frank 
use of books when needed, if ever. We do not rec- 
ognize the real situation. If our standards were rec- 
ogmition-memory instead of recall-memory for a 
vast deal of school material, the time saved could 
be utilized in a more highly individualized program 
and in a greater perfection of rote memories (cler- 
ical, motor, mechanical, technical). These can 
hardly be too well drilled and automatized. 

I wish to close with a paragraph on the type of 
teacher needed to carry out a program of individual- 
ized teaching. I am not insensible to the discourage- 
ment that comes with overcrowding, regimentation, 
martinet supervision and underpay. The problem, 
however, is a deeper one. Raise the mental level of 
the teaching force and the teacher in turn will de- 
mand the needed changes. The truth is we have 
never sensed the enormousness of the problem in the 


194 CONCERNING PARENTS 


training of teachers. We are finding out that in- 
stead of a normal school training, the equivalent to 
a Ph.D. is none too much. The teacher should be 
well grounded in psychology. and experimental 
method, especially in its application to the forma- 
tion of habits and the development of the emotions, 
feeling, reasoning and esthetics. It takes years to 
form the habit of thinking of mental states and 
human action as being just as causal as the behaviors 
in the physical world. The hygiene and mental hy- 
giene of the pre-school and school child, an appre- 
ciation of the work of the habit clinic, an analysis 
of the emotional make-up with all the complexity of 
surrogated affective states and conditioned reflexes, 
—all these have unfolded problems vastly more com- 
plex than had even been anticipated. A picture, a 
perspective of all this, demands years of training, be- 
cause the whole mental concept of looking at human 
behavior as a product of determinisms is, in viola- 
tion of popular belief, the doctrine of free will and 
causal philosophy. 

The teacher must be pragmatic in her views; be 
wholesomely agnostic; and have sufficient experi- 
mental technique to carry on a sustained problem in 
education. She must be sufficiently well educated to 
be unafraid to confess ignorance. She must have a 
thorough knowledge of the psychology of learning. 
Finally she must have a rich and compassionate philo- 
sophical background, with a keen appreciation that 
we live for individualized esthetic values. 


NEWER MEANINGS OF DISCIPLINE 


By Witit1iAmM Hearp Kiupatrick, Px.D. 


Professor in Philosophy of Education, Teachers College, 
Columbia University 


In considering the subject of discipline let us dis- 
tinguish at the outset two things: discipline as a re- 
sult; that is, what we wish from discipline; and dis- 
cipline as a method, or how we may best bring 
about the desired results, whether applied at home 
or at school, or wherever the child may be the sub- 
ject of discipline. 

The next question is, How new are these newer 
ideas about discipline? Typically, they are of the 
last decade or two; but many remains of old disci- 
pline theories are still with us. A survey made in 
Boston in 1845, revealed that in a typical public 
school of four hundred children the average daily 
number of whippings was sixty-five. Probably chil- 
dren are better now than those children were either 
before or after their whippings. We get on with 
fewer whippings and our children seem to be better. 

Beginning, then, with the question of discipline 
as a result, consider the change of ideas. One old 
notion not yet dead, but dying, is that each wrong- 
doing must be punished. Just because the deed is 

195 


196 CONCERNING PARENTS 


wrong and has been done, therefore the child must 
be punished. This is an unfortunate, and, in fact, 
almost totally vicious doctrine. 

Punishment properly looks forward and not back- 
ward. If punishment is to be justified at all, it is be- 
cause it does good afterwards, not because of what 
has happened before. Paradoxically, if we punish 
properly we do not punish because the child has done 
wrong. We punish in order to help him grow, to 
help him and others grow into something better. 
But many conscientious parents still punish the child 
because he has done wrong and therein refuse to 
think clearly about the essential problem of “how 
shall I so treat this child that he may best grow into 
the right kind of character ?” 

Another old notion, dying, though it too is not yet 
dead, is that children are naturally bad and that our 
aim must be to curb them, to break their spirits. 
That this doctrine has some basis of fact seems 
probable, but the facts are probably not as our an- 
cestors saw them. They frequently saw children in 
the light of the old theological doctrine of total de- 
pravity. Even so fine a man as John Wesley said 
“break the will of your child.” 

We have also exactly the contrary doctrine, which 
is not so old but still wrong, that children are natu- 
rally all good and that all that is needed is for adults 
to keep “hands off” and let this good thing grow. 
The doctrine of natural goodness is possibly nearer 
the truth if we take into account how children grow 


NEWER MEANINGS OF DISCIPLINE 197 


up necessarily in a social environment. It is true 
that they do in greater or less measure grow up natu- 
rally to fit the environment, but it still remains true 
that children probably will not, unless there is a cer- 
tain amount of proper guidance and a certain amount 
of occasional real compulsion, grow up into the kind 
of character they should have. 

A further wrong notion that hurts discipline is 
the theory that childhood is not a time of real living 
but is at best a preparation for later living. Our 
mothers quoted their mothers as saying that children 
should be seen and not heard. This was a definite 
recognition that childhood was on a lower plane as 
regards living. This same idea is still to be found 
in such expressions as “He is a good child.’”’? What 
is really meant is that the child suits our purposes by 
being quiet at the right times. 

The idea that childhood is not really and fully a 
part of life is still strong, particularly among curricu- 
lum makers. In one of the latest books on the sub- 
ject of curriculum-making we find: “It is helpful to 
begin with the simple assumption, to be accepted 
literally, that education is to prepare men and women 
for the activities of every kind which make up, or 
ought to make up well-rounded adult life; that it has 
no other purpose; that everything should be done 
with a view to this purpose and nothing should be 
included which does not serve this purpose.” And 
further: “Education is primarily for adult life. Its 
fundamental responsibility is to prepare for the fifty 


198 CONCERNING PARENTS 


years of adulthood, not for the twenty years of child- 
hood and youth.” 

This book is, by many in this country, counted 
to be the latest word on the subject of curriculum- 
making; but the position is unsound. Contrasted 
with this we find in another book which happens to 
be just a year older: “Childhood is not a vestibule 
through which we pass into adulthood. Childhood 
is an intrinsic room in the mansion of life.” 

If we fix these last two sentences in our minds we 
shall make what seems to be the main approach to 
the best of modern thinking on the subject of how 
to deal with childhood; the one thought that more 
than any other must underlie the proper notion of 
discipline. 

From this point of view we do not subordinate 
childhood to adulthood as the older theory did, nor 
do we, as some seem to conceive, subordinate adult- 
hood to childhood. We are to think of childhood 
as being in itself a time of growing in which the 
period up to six, say, grows naturally into the period 
from six to ten. In this sense and manner the ear- 
lier period prepares for the later period. It is a 
continuous process with life at any one stage going 
on as truly as it ever will go on, and the value of 
living then is just as real a value as it ever will be 
at any other time. 

This conception of continuous growing does not, 
then, deny the patent fact that as a child lives dur- 
ing the year from eleven to twelve he will be pre- 


NEWER MEANINGS OF DISCIPLINE 199 


pared to live from twelve to thirteen, and then from 
thirteen to fourteen, and so on continuously. It does 
not deny that fact; it takes it into account; but it 
does refuse to accept the idea that up to twenty the 
child does not really live and that the child should, 
therefore, fill up an otherwise waste period by pre- 
paring for the real life which is to begin when he 
is twenty-one or thereabouts. 

Consider discipline as it contemplates this con- 
tinuous process, each part of the process being life 
and each part being in itself as valuable as any other 
part, so ordered and arranged that no part will hurt 
any part. Since growing is the guiding conception, 
we shall wish such activities at each period as shall 
best accomplish growth with the idea that, if the 
child grows best now, he is best prepared to grow 
at the next stage. Discipline, then, from this point 
of view—our adult part of the discipline—is the way 
in which we treat this child so that his growing may 
be, all things considered, continually at the maximum. 
Our part of the discipline is to help the child while 
he is now living to learn such things as enrich his 
life now and promise most for the next period, and 
sO on, in such manner as to make most for this con- 
tinuous growing. 

In order that we may more clearly see what this 
means for discipline, let us analyze this conception 
of growth a little further. What constitutes grow- 
ing? When has a child grown? Under what heads 
does he grow? 


200 CONCERNING PARENTS 


There are of course many ways of analyzing grow- 
ing. We might pick out three heads under which we 
should look for growth. First, a child should, as he 
gets older, increase in outlook and insight into the 
possibilities of immediate life, so that when he is 
twelve years old he should see more possibilities in 
his day by day living, than he saw previously, and 
this increase in outlook and insight is because of 
what happened to him before he was twelve years 
old. Furthermore, we wish him so to live while he 
is twelve years old that when he is thirteen years 
old he may then see yet further possibilities than he 
has up to this time seen. That is one line of growth. 

In connection with the child’s growth we should 
keep in the background of our consciousness first of 
all that life about him is shifting and changing very 
rapidly. The older ones of us know very acutely 
that this is a different world from the world we first 
looked out upon. Every line of argument tells us 
that it will be even more different to the next genera- 
tion. We want this child to grow in such insight as 
enables him to look out efficiently upon a shifting - 
and changing world. 

Secondly, we wish the child to increase in the 
matter of the strength and discrimination of his at- 
titudes towards life. This means that as the process 
of growing continues the child will discriminate 
more and more clearly the different things about him, 
deciding that this thing is good and this other is 
bad; how and why this is good or desirable and that 


NEWER MEANINGS OF DISCIPLINE 201 


is bad or undesirable. Corresponding with this dis- 
crimination, there should grow stronger inclinations 
to hold to the good things and to reject the evil 
things. 

The third head of growing is in technique of con- 
trol. That is to say, the child should grow in eff- 
ciency of accomplishing what he has more wisely 
chosen in accordance with his better outlook and his 
better discriminated attitudes. We wish him more 
efficiently to pursue the ends which he now more 
wisely chooses. 

These, then, are the three heads under which 
growth desirably takes place. We may perhaps sum 
this up by saying that we wish the child to grow 
in intelligent self-direction, or, in still other words, 
grow in the integration of self as the self is increas- 
ingly adapted to the control of this shifting world. 

Such an adaptation is not a passive matter, though 
the child must learn that some things cannot be done. 
Rather is it an active adaptation in which the child 
learns increasingly to criticize his environment and 
increasingly grows in the power to change it. I 
think then of our discipline as helping the child to 
increasing self-control so that he can make his own 
decisions and thus increasingly become a strong self- 
directing personality that takes proper account of 
others that they too may grow into such self-direct- 
ing personalities. 

So far we have been discussing discipline as an 
end, especially the changes to be made in our concep- 


202 CONCERNING PARENTS 


tions of the end of discipline and this end is exactly 
the kind of character into which we hope our chil- 
dren will grow as we undertake our part in influenc- 
ing their living. For no other purpose do we exer- 
cise discipline. 

Now let us turn to a consideration of discipline 
as means. How shall we so manage these children, 
how shall we so manage ourselves in relation to them, 
that they may grow into the kind of character we 
have been discussing? 

First let us look at two inadequate ways of view- 
ing this matter. One old notion is that the child is 
to be considered as essentially bad, and, therefore, 
must be held in and pushed down. The other is that 
the child’s self is of such nature that you have either 
to threaten it to keep it from doing wrong things or 
to bribe it to do good things. 

We, therefore, find a considerable group of peo- 
ple who look upon discipline with the idea that unless 
punishments are applied, or prizes given, no one 
would have any inducement to do the right thing. 
The self as such is indifferent. It must be moved 
from the outside. Those who hold this do not say 
it in so many words but what they really think in 
their hearts is that nobody could ever come to love 
the good and the right and that nobody in his right 
mind would ever choose a good thing unless he were 
paid some way to do it, or would ever avoid cer- 
tain attractive evil things unless he were threatened 
with some punishment. To these people the self 


NEWER MEANINGS OF DISCIPLINE 203 


waits indifferent till it is thus threatened or bribed. 
This conception is fortunately dying. 

Another inadequate point of view, better than the 
preceding but still inadequate, admits that it is pos- 
sible to build habits in people in accordance with 
which they will of themselves do the right thing, but 
—and here is the inadequacy of it—this position 
holds that mere repetition is the only necessary thing 
in order to build these habits. It says that what we 
have got to do is “to make ’em do it,’ and that if 
we will make them do it often enough, consistently 
enough, they will in the end grow that way. 

This “‘hard-boiled” position I wish to deny. And 
in order to do so successfully, we must go somewhat 
into the psychology of character building. | 

First of all, character is the sum total of all of 
our habits, habits of thinking, habits of feeling as 
well as habits of outward moving. Nature gives us 
a very plastic nervous system. In the last five years 
we have not been saying as much about instincts as 
formerly. We are increasingly emphasizing the 
plastic nature of humanity, the plastic character of 
our natures. We are seeing, as never before, that 
the emotions, the fears, the likes, the dislikes, are 
largely, almost entirely, built into people in their 
early years. 

This is the basis upon which we are to work. Let 
us now goa step further. If any trait, be it a think- 
ing habit or an emotional attitude or a motor habit, 
is to be built in a child, it must be built because he 


204 CONCERNING PARENTS 


practices that thing. We acquire only what we prac- 
tice; we learn the responses that we make. This 
seems obvious and yet, the majority of people in this 
country in effect expect that children shall grow up 
into self-directing men and women without practic- 
ing self-direction. 

We have innumerable parents who say the child is 
too young to decide; he must wait till he gets older 
before he can decide. They therefore decide all mat- 
ters—so far as they can—for their children. The 
rule about practice says that the only way to learn 
to decide is by practicing deciding. “But,” say many 
people, “if the child does not know how to decide 
and you let him decide, then he will decide wrong 
and he will grow up the wrong way.”’ We shall 
come to this difficulty in a moment. Meanwhile the 
rule holds: We do not learn anything unless we prac- 
tice that thing. 

Before bringing up the next point, it may be well 
to notice a very important type of learning; the way 
in which the young child learns most of his fears. 
I refer to learning by association or by “condition- 
ing” as it is frequently called. The classical instance 
is Pawlaw’s dog who learned to secrete saliva at the 
ringing of a bell. The dog was allowed to smell 
some savory meat and at the same time a bell was 
rung. The savory meat made his mouth water 
(saliva was secreted). This was kept up day after 
day, the bell always being rung at the same time the 
meat was smelled. After a while the bell alone suf- 





NEWER MEANINGS OF DISCIPLINE 205 


ficed to bring the flow of saliva. Association had 
got in its work, the response of the saliva flow which 
at first was joined only to the smell of savory food 
was now joined separately to the sound of the bell. 
In this same way a child who at first played con- 
tentedly with a rabbit has been taught later to fear 
the rabbit by associating the sight of the rabbit with 
a harsh sound of which the child was already afraid. 
It appears to be true that most fears and many likes 
and dislikes are not native but acquired, being built 
up in this same way. 

We are now ready to go back to our question of 
discipline and how traits are built. We have seen 
that no positive trait is built unless it is practiced. 
We are now ready to say that mere practice is not 
sufficient. We may practice a thing and actually 
learn not to do it. Mere practice does not tell the 
whole story. Suppose for instance an older brother 
is throwing a ball for his little brother to catch. At 
first the little boy misses about three balls out of 
four thrown to him. In the end he catches nearly 
all. How did he learn? He began by practicing 
_ wrong more times than he practices right. Why then 
did he not learn the wrong ways, since he practiced 
them more often than he did the right? The matter 
is too complicated to go into all the details, but it 
comes to this: The child was set on catching the ball; 
accordingly when he succeeded he was glad, when he 
failed he was sorry. 

The satisfaction of success made him more likely 


206 CONCERNING PARENTS 


to repeat the movements that brought success; and 
the annoyance of failure made him less likely to re- 
peat any way that brought failure. He learned thus 
both from success and from failure. 

Aside from learning by association it seems to be 
universally true that we learn not everything we prac- 


tice but we learn to do what we practice with suc- | 


cess. We learn not to do what we practice with fail- 
ure. 

This means, then, that every person who is tc 
learn along any line must have such an attitude to- 
wards the thing that success is satisfying and failure 
is annoying. If then our child is to build in his 
character any particular habit or any particular atti- 
tude (apart from certain rather mechanical associa- 
tions) he must not only practice it but he must prac- 
tice it under such conditions that he knows success 
from failure, and with such an attitude toward it 
that success satisfies and failure annoys. 

The result of this is that the child must himself 
have the proper attitude towards the thing. It is his 
attitude that counts. He must be glad when he suc- 
ceeds and sorry when he fails. This means that we 
as parents, or as teachers, cannot by coercion do the 
whole thing. We have got to bring it about in some 
way that the child is on our side in the matter. 
Otherwise, the practice may build in him an aver- 
sion.to the thing we wish him to acquire. Instead 
of learning to do the thing at the right time he may 
learn not to do it. 


NEWER MEANINGS OF DISCIPLINE 207 


Herein, I believe, is the explanation of much of 
our failure along the line of character building. We 
do not take fully enough into account this one fact, 
that the child must practice with satisfaction to him- 
self 1f the thing is to be built into his character. . If 
he practices a thing with annoyance to himself, it is 
built out of his character. We may stand by and 
regret it, but we cannot make him wrsh the thing we 
wish him to wish. His attitude in the matter is be- 
yond our direct control. We have to get at it indi- 
rectly. 

If, then, we would successfully direct the educa- 
tion of any child—I avoid the word “discipline” be- 
cause it is so bound up with coercion and punishment 
——we must understand how learning takes place. We 
must give the child opportunity to practice the de- 
sired good qualities under conditions that will let him 
know success from failure, and make him glad when 
he succeeds and sorry when he fails. 

The best way to do this seems to be by having him 
live, work, act in a social situation with a good many 
of his fellows. When it comes to building charac- 
ter, it is practically impossible to build character 
apart from the social situation in which the charac- 
ter is to be practiced. Here our schools have largely 
failed. We have not allowed our children to live in 
them under conditions that give sufficient variety of 
practice. Particularly we have not given them the 
opportunity to practice the social virtues. We have, 
for instance, made talking a sin. We have made 


208 CONCERNING PARENTS 


helping another child a sin. We have so far as we | 
could, made cooperation impossible. It is along these 
lines that children really learn morals and really 
build their characters. 

The story is now complete; but there are two or 
three matters that, if they are left untouched, might 
cause misapprehension. 

First is the question of punishment. It is psycho- 
logically possible to use punishment, occasionally, to 
advantage. Ifa child is to learn not to do a simple 
thing we may, and especially if it be a young child, 
use a certain mild amount of punishment to advan- 
tage. However, if it is a complicated thing that the 
child is to learn positively to do, it is almost certain 
that the punishment will do more harm than good. 
The older the child the more likelihood there is that 
the punishment will do harm. 

It may do harm in two ways. Whether or not the 
child learns not to do the thing depends upon whether 
he regrets having done it. If we punish a child 
there are at least three things he may regret. First, 
he may regret that he has done wrong. If he genu- 
inely regrets that he has done wrong, he is less likely 
to do wrong again. Second, he may regret that he 
got caught. If he regrets only that we caught him 
doing wrong, then he is less likely to get caught the 
next time, which is not the kind of moral training 
that we want. Third, if he is an older child he may 
regret that he stayed at home and took the punish- 
ment. Many a boy, accumulating resentment at this 





NEWER MEANINGS OF DISCIPLINE 209 


sort of thing, has run away from home. Whether 
or not punishment does harm or good, depends upon 
where the regret is located and it is the child that 
locates the regret. We may have a hand in the mat- 
ter, but his voice is final. 

The second way in which punishment may do harm 
has to do with the fact that the child is never learn- 
ing just one thing. He is always learning many 
_ things simultaneously. When a child does anything, 
there are a number of attitudes that go along with it. 
He has an attitude towards the thing that he is doing, 
towards his parent or teacher who makes him do it, 
towards the others who work with him at the time, 
towards the house or place in which it is being done, 
towards himself as capable of doing it. There are 
always a number of attitudes that are being built 
along with whatever you do. 

Now, it is exceedingly difficult to punish and not 
_ have the wrong kind of attitude come out of it. It 
may be possible, but it is exceedingly difficult, so 
that whenever we punish a child we must take ac- 
count, on the one hand, of the positive good we ex- 
pect and, on the other hand, of what evil will almost 
surely follow. Then we must balance the good and 
the evil and be careful to see that the balance is on 
the side of the good and not on the side of the evil. 
These two considerations of where the regret is 
placed and the possible bad attitudes built reduce pun- 
ishment to a very restricted place in real discipline. 

Next let us say a word about suppression in the 


210 CONCERNING PARENTS 


Freudian sense. It is too complicated to go fully 
into here, but we may say in general this. Anything 
that one resents may, if it happens again with fur- 
ther resentment, accumulate resentment until the per- 
son is poisoned, as it were, to the situation, to the 
person, to the circumstances under which the resent- 
ment has arisen, and not simply with resentment but 
with fear and many other negative attitudes as well. 
Wherever we do not understand a thing, wherever 
we think about it and think that we ought not to 
think about it, wherever we have an attitude and can- 
not act it out, we are in danger of building this kind 
of suppressed poisoned attitude. 

What, then, shall we do? How shall we go about 
it? How shall we manage our children? First we 
wish as far as feasible to avoid doing things with 
them that they cannot understand. That is to say, 
as far as possible we want them to understand what 
we do, what we require. We wish to build up in 
them the belief that we are fair and square with them. 
It isn’t always easy but we must work in that direc- 
tion. 

We wish also—and here is a very delicate matter 
—to avoid building taboos. What do we mean by a 
taboo? A taboo is a negative response, a thing we 
don’t do because we greatly fear that it is wrong, 
or, more briefly, it is a negative response surcharged 
with fear. A great many people try to build all of 
their moral precepts as taboos in their children. We 











NEWER MEANINGS OF DISCIPLINE 2It 


find in this one of the greatest faults to which other- 
wise very intelligent parents are subject. 

A taboo about anything means that the child can- 
not think thereafter intelligently about that thing. 
Whatever one holds as a taboo he can’t think intelli- 
gently about. This works badly in two ways. First, 
many wrong social doctrines are built as taboos in 
early childhood. Thereafter the holders of such doc- 
trines cannot make the necessary adjustments that 
the situation, as seen by the wiser thought, demands. 


Progress and individual and social adjustment are 


hindered. Second, childhood easily misconceives the 
situation under which even a virtue is properly to be 


exercised. If a virtue is taught with taboo inflexi- 
_ bility it may actually become a hindrance to a proper 


moral conduct. If we are to live happily and suc- 


| cessfully in this complex and changing world we must 
hold our habits and ideas, even our moral habits and 


ideas, subject to a more mature scrutiny and to con- 
sequent possible revision. We feel forced to con- 
clude that we should be careful about building as ta- 
boos even the moral virtues. Psychiatry and sociol- 
ogy seem alike to show that great evil may result 
from the unwise fixing of even moral prejudices, 
What now is the conclusion of the whole matter? 
If we are going to discipline our children aright, we 
shall wish for them and bring it about as far as we 


can that they have a happy wholesome infancy in 


_ which health is especially considered. In this period 


Pa er CONCERNING PARENTS 


we shall protect them from hurtful fears and we 
shall be careful that we do not hedge about our moral 
injunctions with taboo-like fears. 

As the children grow older we shall still wish for 
them a happy childhood. We shall wish this child- 
hood to be full of activity, gripping, challenging, va- 
ried activity, under wise guidance. The wise guid- 
ance is to take care of particular difficulties; the ac- 
tivities are to furnish the main line. In this way 
they will build all-round, integrated character. This 
is the only kind of discipline we need to care about. 





PART. 
LEISURE AND RECREATION 









SUGGESTED READING FOR PART V 


Your Child Today and Tomorrow—Sidonie M. Gruen- 
berg; Lippincott, 1913. 

Spontaneous and Supervised Play in Childhood—Alice 
C. Sies; Macmillan, 1922. 

Play in Education—Joseph Lee; Macmillan, 1915. 

Education Through Play—Henry S. Curtis; Macmillan, 
IgI7. 

Children’s Play and Its Place in Education—Walter 
Wood; Duffield, 1925. 

The Boy and His Gang—J. Adams Puffer; Houghton 
Mifflin, 1912. 

Children’s Reading, L. M. Terman and M. Lima; Apple- 

ton, 1925. 









LEISURE AND RECREATION 


WE are still in the very infancy of our knowledge 
of child psychology, child intuitions, child desires. 
We have learned something about the physical health 
of children. We have only to follow the vital sta- 
tistics of the last decade or two to see what tremen- 
dous strides have been made in that direction, Now 
we are going still further. We are beginning to 
study the child from the mental side, and in addi- 
tion to that, we are going to study the parent. 

It is an axiom that in our larger cities only the 
very poor and the very rich can get good medical 
attention, while the great stratum between the two 
find it difficult to get adequate care. Those are the 
people who need consideration, so far as the training 
of children is concerned, particularly with reference 
to the problems of play, recreation and education. 

There seems to be conflict of opinion as to whether 
or not we are living in a tremendously bad age and 
whether our children are growing up under condi- 
tions that are inimical, dangerous and tending to 
their complete demoralization. What we must re- 
member is that more tremendous discoveries, more 
scientific research, more new things have been given 
to us in the last fifty years than were given in the 
preceding five thousand. It is because these have 

215 


216 CONCERNING PARENTS 


come intensively, that the particular transition period 
in which we are living is one which accentuates and 
emphasizes these problems. 

Our present-day boys and girls, in their attempt at 
self-expression, are superior, I think, to the boys and 
girls of the past. At least they have lost one thing, 
and that is fear. At least they are acting openly and 
not secretly. We have at least lost the old time 
prudery, which kept us from knowing what was 
going on. 

I am not at all afraid of our young manhood and 
our young womanhood. All that is necessary is that 
we realize that these sudden changes—the introduc- 
tion of the automobile and the radio and the tremen- 
dous scientific facts back of all these things—will 
make for good and not for evil. 

Dr. LEE K. FRANKEL, 
Vice-president, Metropolitan 
Life Insurance Co. 


YOUTH AND PLAY-TIME 


By Miriam VAN Waters, PH.D, 


Referee, Juvenile Court, Los Angeles. 


From a child’s point of view, it seems to me there 
is no leisure time. Life for the child is not divided 
into our modern compartments—health, nutrition, 
school, supervised play, work, moral education, psy- 
chology, human relationships and so forth; that is 
to say, the child does not approach life from the 
point of view of compartments. His life is one 
great, central activity, and it is divided perhaps into 
two aspects, the things one must do because of adult 
pressure, and the things one has to do because of 
one’s own inner life and interests, because of intense 
personal impulses. 

William Burnham, of Clark University, used to 
say that the psychologist has very properly deprived 
us of our instincts; that the only thing that we can 
be quite sure of is the impulse to activity. 

Leisure is an unsolved problem of our civilization. 
The whole concept of leisure time is a modern con- 
cept, one of those social changes taking place ob- 
scurely but surely; possibly a social change brought 
about from the intensity of our industrial develop- 
ment. 


From the point of view of behavior in early child- 
217 


218 CONCERNING PARENTS 


hood, the distinction between work and play is surely 
arbitrary. Suppose we have a little child whose 
mother is busy in the kitchen, an infant, a trouble- 
some, curious infant, and she places him in a high- 
chair, as one mother did very ingeniously, with mo- 
lasses on both fingers and a feather. The infant is 
completely engrossed. A boy who has a good tool 
shop is busy. He doesn’t know the distinction be- 
tween work and play. He is absorbed. The artist 
has no leisure, many social workers have no leisure, 
and the obsessed parent has no leisure. 

I think we must face the inadequacy of any educa- 
tional program or of any method of regulation which 
we have yet devised for treating leisure in a construc- 
tive way. For example, our law enforcement activi- 
ties, the police, the protective workers, the courts, 
all of these agencies are concerned mainly with the 
end-results of spare time. So that any modern study 
of leisure must take in the whole problem of alcohol, 
the manufactured, commercialized, thrill of baseball, 
the violation of petty ordinances, and all that comes 
under the heading of malicious mischief and prostitu- 
tion. The existence of these problems shows how 
poorly we are organized for leisure. 

What do you do when you can do as you please? 
If our young boys and girls, the moment they are re- 
leased from our supervision, our highly organized 
programs, can think of nothing more interesting and 
stimulating to do than to take a joy ride, which, from 
an adult point of view, is stupid and dangerous, just 


YOUTH AND PLAY-TIME 219 


how tar have we gone in our program for organizing 
leisure? 

There is need for a new sense of responsibility, 
call it chivalry, if that word conveys to you sanctity 
and the protection of the weak by the strong—and 
that is the chivalry of adults toward youth. So much 
of our law-enforcement program is directed against 
young people, who seizing this so-called freedom imi- 
tate the behavior of adults, and their selfishness, igno- 
rance and indifference cause the shipwreck of boys 
and girls. Would it not be possible for us to cease 
putting so much energy into law enforcement, and 
strive to create better manners and customs among 
those adults who contribute to juvenile delinquency? 

From the genetic point of view, with the individ- 
ual child, leisure begins when the child is thrown 
for the first time on his own resources, really when 
the child is deprived of the presence of the mother, 
when he is left alone. To this period of life belong 
our thumb-sucking activities, the use of pacifiers, and 
other stimuli. Leisure is all the time that is not 
given to food and sleep. It takes up the major por- 
tion of the inner life of the child. 

If we follow Dr. Thomas, our inner life has two 
aspects. Perhaps it has more, but these two include 
the rest. One aspect is the desire for response, and 
the other is the desire for new experience. We have 
a planned and regulated schedule for infancy. We 
leave the hygienic child so very much alone, so very 
much thrown on his own resources, that lack of stim- 


220 CONCERNING PARENTS 


ulation by adults of the child’s interest in objective 
reality brings to us later on a generation of young 
people who are abnormally hungry for response, be- 
cause they have been prematurely deprived of the 
presence of a comforting mother. 

Now, with adolescents, response is always a new 
experience because of the complexities of human per- 
sonalities. No doubt many crushes, jealousies, the 
sense of possession, baffled and bewildered personal 
relationships, go back to this failure of adults to have 
enough knowledge to understand leisure in this 
broader sense, lack of knowledge on the part of 
parents, and lack of opportunity in our community. 

Leisure for us is most urgently an adolescent prob- 
lem, and no society has solved the problem of pro- 
vision of outlets for all the impulses of youth. We 
must seek to understand those hidden springs of 
emotion, and in order to change conduct we must dis- 
cover new channels of activity and set the whole 
stage afresh. “Seduction is better than force.” If, 
through our skill as educators and leaders of youth 
we can direct the impulses of young people into cer- 
tain channels which we consider socially desirable we 
are in control of the situation. At present, though, 
we are really not organized to provide outlets for 
these impulses, and our very regulation and the pres- 
sure of home and school interfere with normal 
growth. 

For instance, in the old days of Theodate Smith’s 
Child Welfare Institute at Clark University, there 





YOUTH AND PLAY-TIME 221 


came a boy referred by the public schools of Wor- 
-cester, Massachusetts, because he could not learn 
arithmetic. He was so dull that he was promoted 
into the next class so that his teacher could be rid 
of him. One very intelligent teacher noticed that the 
boy was always absorbed, so she said to him: 

“What do you do when the rest of us are doing 
arithmetic?” 

The boy said, “Why, I am working out the prob- 
lem of how thin it could be.” 

This teacher had the gift of imagination. She did 
not immediately send for a psychiatrist or a mental 
tester. She said, “Yes, and what about it?” 

“Well,” he said, “you know, I am building an 

aquarium. I am interested in fish, and I was just 
wondering how thin the partitions could be and still 
support the water. 
_ This boy was devoting his school hours to figuring 
out rather complex mathematical problems, and by 
working through his interest, the teacher had him on 
his feet in a short time, demonstrating the mathe- 
matical relationships of his problem to the class. 

Let us turn our attention briefly to the problem of 
modern industry. We fail to recognize the far- 
reaching effect of industrialism, that is to say me- 
chanical processes. What happens to family life 
when the father returns from the factory or the of- 
fice, drained of energy,is evident. The same thing 
goes on when the child returns from school! or other 
organized modern activities, drained of energy. 


222 CONCERNING PARENTS 


Since so little of our vocational training is cultural, 
it is evidently built on the assumption that people 
will work every day, all the time. There is no unem- 
ployment contemplated in this schedule of vocational 
education and training. As a matter of fact, there 
are periods of unemployment, during which individ- 
uals are thrown back on their own resources. I 
think no one has ever studied sufficiently the psy- 
chological effects of unemployment. 

Those who remember Butler’s “Way of all Flesh” 
(that deeply stimulating book which should be in the 
hands of every parent and every teacher) will recall 
that much of the misery came about in that English 
clergyman’s home because the father had so much 
time and so much ability for the misuse of time. 
Social workers have, then, a new task, a new objec- 
tive in education; that of developing adult personal- 
ities so that they will not be bored, or appalled with 
their leisure time. 

Then we face the problem of organizing commu- 
nity life for the needs of adolescence. So much of 
our work with adolescents is too narrow in scope. 
We forget the dual nature of adolescence, on the 
one hand the search for new experience, the ability 
to make new and independent contributions in a time 
of social upheaval, on the other the mood of de- 
pendence and the wistful need of security. 

The independent investigation and acceptance of 
experience suit one phase of youth very well, the 
phase of adolescent adventure, self-reliance and 





YOUTH AND PLAY-TIME 223 


bravado. Social workers often note the ability of 
young people to meet emergencies and to accept hard- 
ships and disappointment with unbelievable courage. 
Their flippancy and nonchalance often cover and 
obscure a brave spirit. 

A neglected phase of youth is the collapsing mood. 
Youth is full of depressions, depletions and feelings 
of inadequacy. In this phase we fail them most. 
We ourselves are not anchored. Weare full of com- 
plaints, doubts, whims and moods. It is easy for 
our children to get the impression that although life 
is a possible process and one can, by certain energies, 
skills and taboos, “get by” it is hardly worth while. 

It is our task, is it not, to furnish a serene philoso- 
phy? If the parent is serene, and wise, and has 
found meaning in life, all the freedom in the world 
for the child cannot matter. He has something of 
the experience of the mystic in the sense of belonging 
definitely to a background. It is the feeling of se- 
curity created by the statement, “I am with you al- 
way, even unto the end of the world.” That sort 
of feeling in the life of a young person, who has 
come to feel reliance in a background of adequate 
adult experience, is a safeguard against any kind of 
misuse of freedom. 

Youth, as Dr, Frankwood Williams has pointed 
out, is achieving one of those necessary steps in hu- 
man evolution, the emancipation of the child from 
the parent. We place emphasis on this to-day be- 
cause it is So necessary. 


224 CONCERNING PARENTS 


It is not sufficient that youth adjust itself to the 
present social situation and achieve conformity to 
the behavior codes of parents. If emancipation 
from parental control is necessary for individual ma- 
turity it is no less important that youth seek emanci- 
pation from outworn social forms. The danger is 
that the feeling of emancipation tends to become a 
goal rather than a stimulus to constructive social ac- 
tivity. In all periods of rapid change of manners 
and customs youth plays a prominent role in experi- 
mentation. 

Furthermore, leisure, with the adolescent, is the 
chief opportunity that we can find to integrate per- 
sonality, that is to say to bring it all together into 
an organized whole. I think it is Burnham who has 
pointed out in popular speech this very real concept. 
We say, when a man is beside himself, that he “flies 
to pieces” and then we tell him “to pull himself to- 
gether.” Popular speech thus has a clear idea of the 
process of integration, and this is the supreme func- 
tion of our leisure time. The task could integrate if 
it were a creative task, but usually it is not. 

The proof that we are not organized to meet this 
need is that we still feel the necessity for violence 
and excessive manifestations of energy. Youth in 
all ages has had to have festivals, scenes of carnival; 
complete sanity is not desirable, and there is a justi- 
fication for this, because in adolescence, the senses, 
each one of them, develop certain characteristic 
changes of structure and function. ‘Pleasure and 


YOUTH AND PLAY-TIME 225 


pain are more keenly and widely felt. The skin be- 
comes a new organ of the mind.” Is not that why 
our young people turn to cosmetics and baths and all 
the dermal stimulation to which young people are so 
prone? ‘Then, there is the sense of taste. There are 
the new drinks, those horrible chemical stimulations, 
sweetened and colored, which our young people 
drink. This is a mark of desire, an attempt to sat- 
isfy new hungers. There is the increased sensitivity 
to smell, with all that it means to love-life, the per- 
fumes, the musk with which youth saturates itself. 

At puberty there is a marked acceleration in reac- 
tion time; young people respond more quickly to less 
stimulus. The old studies of Meuman, a pioneer in 
this field, and Merrill and Seashore in Chicago, and 
_ the Iowa University studies, all indicate that adoles- 
cence is a time of quickened sensitivity. 

Recently, a friend of mine called my attention to 
an eighteenth century novel, printed about 1760, a 
novel of Frances Burney, where a group of young, 
well-born adolescent boys seize and rob an old lady 
driving in her coach. They bind her and throw her 
into a ditch. That is their idea of a good time. In 
the novel, this is not told as a shocking thing, but as 
an amusing prank. An old and disagreeable lady 
thrown into a ditch and tied up,—a ludicrous idea! 

She is rescued by her granddaughter whom she 
slaps in the face. You can see how these people 
laughed. It was funny. | 

To-day our notions of what is right and proper 


226 CONCERNING PARENTS 


appear to have changed. We no longer have chil- 
dren who torture animals with adults not disapprov- 
ing. We have an idea that our manners and morals 
have changed, have softened, and that this delight in 
physical cruelty, which the race has never been able 
wholly to shake off, has somehow passed. 


ee 


After I read this eighteenth century novel, I felt : 
like saying, “Well, at least we have got beyond the © 
point where this thing is acceptable to modern so- © 


ciety.” That very day in the New York Herald, on 
the 27th of October, carried this headline, “Rowdies 
nearly kill surgeon as he aids Duchess.” A boy on 
a bicycle ran down a duchess, fifteen of his pals 
came to his aid with a baseball bat and beat the sur- 
geon who was trying to help her. But our attitude 
is different. We no longer think that this is amusing. 
We think it terrible. 

These outbreaks of youth do not teach us that we 
need more policemen, more repression; we need more 
“constructive outlets,” but this is just a term. We 
cannot define it exactly. It is simply a great goal, a 
great question mark. 

Another approach to the study of leisure is 
through the faults of children. Their faults are a 
challenge to better understanding of the demands of 
their inner life. In leisure, children attend to the real 
business of life. A study of children’s lies is most 
instructive. The lies reveal the cravings and the 
hopes of children. For instance, I have learned re- 
cently that Darwin was a liar. When he was a little 


YOUTH AND PLAY-TIME 227 


boy, he told his admiring friends that he could make 
colored polyanthus at will simply by watering the 
plants with different colored water. He had never 
undertaken this experiment, and he knew he never 
had, but here we have in the child-mind of Darwin a 
magnificent absorption in a scientific problem, a mag- 
nificent hope; an understanding parent or teacher, in-— 
stead of chastising the youthful Darwin for wishing 

to produce colored polyanthus should have encour- 
aged him to experiment with the idea. 

Then we recall how, as the result of leisure-time 
among the Chinese, the compass was developed, and 
gunpowder. Originally the appurtances of a festival, 
children’s toys, we have taken these simple devices of 
leisure-time and have made more or less fiendish uses 
of both of them. 

What will they say of us a hundred years from 
now, about our leisure? We spend much of our 
leisure time in talk. We have known the thrill of 
flying, another leisure-time device, and all the joy 
of scientific curiosity and discovery. But still jazz, 
I think, expresses us best. This lurching rhythm, 
this unquiet, crude approximation of a psychic 
orgasm, gives us a typical expression of the needs 
of our time, something about to be born struggling 
through the jazz rhythm. We so underestimate 
what youth thinks of all of this. 

Do children respond any more to ‘‘good’’ music? 
They listen to it, on the whole, with complete indif- 
ference. Recently, I observed an adolescent boy on’ 


228 CONCERNING PARENTS 


a camping party who was in love with a giri far 
away. He enjoyed the woods, but when he arrived 
at the destination and found in the cabin a little, old, 
horrible phonograph and a few jazz records, he set 
one on. As it whirled around, he went out to the 
edge of the porch, looked off into the forest, and 
soon, with all this impossible noise going on, the 
youth began to shed tears. I asked him what he was 
playing, thereby running the risk of losing his re- 
spect, because I should have known what it was. It 
turned out to be “The Love Bird.” I never could 
distinguish this particular form of noise from the 
other forms of noise that cabin contained, but to him 
it was the adequate stimulus, something which we 
should respect, something which we must understand. 

Let us conclude by hunting for a few dynamic 
aspects of our problem. I think, in spite of all the 
confusion of our modern life, that youth does find the 
adequate emotional stimulus by reason of his own 
creative power, and we should rely on the impulses 
of youth, because this power is constant; we have 
not destroyed it by our confusion. It will not be 
lost in our social upheaval. All we can do is to trust 
it and try to create outlets. 

Then, there is need for emphasis upon the person- 
ality traits of all those whose function it is to organ- 
ize the leisure time of young people. There, if 
anywhere, we need inspirers. The Greeks called their 
teachers inspirers because they believed that enthusi- 
asm is the only vitalizer of the mind. We should 


YOUTH AND PLAY-TIME 229 


ask ourselves, what is it that opens the door in any 
individual case? Surely an enlightened personality 
with some serene goal is essential. The greatest 
need we have to-day is for a guiding line, a philoso- 
phy of life which children can respect. In other 
words, as a Chinese philosopher says, “When the 
mind is ready, everything is ready.” All these pro- 
grams, all these things that we want done will come 
to us when we get this attitude. 

Finally, it is our problem to discover new channels 
in which the impulses of youth may flow. The 
danger that we all recognize in the training of young 
children is diverting their attention from things they 
are spontaneously interested in. In adolescence, I 
think, as in childhood, there is a supreme need for 
imitation, something worth while to imitate. The 
adult should present a certain amount of skill and 
a certain amount of enthusiasm. 

We must arrange some project in which young 
people may participate involving enterprises inter- 
esting and of value to the whole community, and in 
this we have to look to certain adults as map makers 
of the whole field. 

If we study leadership activities, we find that the 
individual usually has an excessive activity. We are 
trying to study in Los Angeles the leadership traits of 
adolescents who have become anti-social and the 
leadership traits of young delinquent girls who, in 
spite of their delinquency, have been leaders for what 
we call “good,” and then we are checking up these 


230 CONCERNING PARENTS 


facts by studying a group of young people in high 
school who are leaders and who are not delinquent. 
It is too early to make any generalization, but the 
leader is always an actor. He has excessive vitality. 

Does not this give us an idea that we have to get 
anew concept? It is not enough to have abolished 
hell for our young people. We have got to do some- 
thing to modernize heaven. The modern boy or girl 
would be extremely bored if, as the result of a career 
of virtue, he had to go to a place of eternal rest and 
harp music. 

All of our leisure activities have been placed under 
regulation, more or less, but we must plan a new 
approach here The old way is not enough, and one 
of our American philosophers has summed it up very 
well in the statement, ‘“Those who can not remember 
the past are condemned to repeat it.” 


THE EFFECT OF MACHINE-MADE 
RECREATION ON FAMILY LIFE 


By Joun M. Cooper, Pu.D. 


Associate Professor of Sociology, Catholic University 
of America ; 


WE all recall no doubt the familiar story of 
Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. His patron, Prince 
Esterhazy, had, it seems, refused the request of the 
composer and of his orchestra to be let off to visit 
their families. Haydn then so composed his Fare- 
well Symphony that as its first rendition proceeded 
the players, one by one, their respective parts over, 
blew out their candles and left the hall. Towards the 
end the leader alone remained and as the last low 
note died away he too did as his musicians had done: 
and went forth. 

Something not unlike this early musician’s walk- 
out has come to pass in our contemporary family life, 
albeit the walkout has taken place less dramatically 
and indeed almost without observation. Tradition- 
ally and as far back into the dark abyss of time as. 
history and prehistory carry us, the human home has: 
been the living center of a score of activities that 
may be roughly classified as work and play. Since 

231 


232 CONCERNING PARENTS 


the dawn of the modern industrial revolution, one 
after another of these traditional home activities has, 
so to speak, blown out its candle, packed up its violin, 
and betaken itself to other parts. Work and play 
that have been home-centered since the days of the 
river-drift men are no longer home-centered. This 
is putting the case a bit too sweepingly, it is true, but 
the statement in its broad lines stands. 

Under the older economic and domestic order, 
work and play were daily and hourly shared by parent 
and child. Parent and child were physically together 
or within calling and speaking distance of each other 
for the greater part of each twenty-four hours. Not 
only that, but parent and child took active part in a 
joint enterprise of work and play. It was such phy- 
sical togetherness and such shared activities that 
made possible and relatively easy the fulfillment of 
the home’s primary biological and social function, 
child-education, child-training, child-rearing. Child- 
rearing cannot be carried out by long-distance meth- 
ods. Child-training cannot be brought about by 
night letters and radiograms. A sine qua non is 
personal contact, continuous personal contact over 
many years, by day and night, of parent with child. 
And this continuous personal contact must be, so far 
as possible, an active rather than a passive one, the 
living contact that comes from shared activities and 
enterprises and responsibilities. Where parent and 
child are kept apart for the greater proportion of the 
day and evening, and where they share a highly re- 


EFFECT OF MACHINE-MADE RECREATION 233 


duced minimum of work and play activities together, 
—and these are the two conditions that widely ob- 
tain under the new domestic order in the homes of 
all economic classes, the rich, as well as the poor,— 
the home is gravely handicapped in the fulfillment 
of its primary biological and social function, the rear- 
ing of the child. 

It is against this background that the effect of 
machine-made recreation upon family life must be 
viewed. How far has machine-made recreation 
tended to hold parent and child together or put them 
apart? How far has it tended to bind or scatter 
them in their play activities? 

To define our field a little more clearly, we are not 
discussing the effect of all away-from-home and 
commercialized recreation upon family life, nor the 
still broader question of the effect of machinery and 
of our whole machine-made industrial civilization 
upon family life. We are confining our attention to 
the consideration of the effect of machine-made rec- 
veation upon family life. 

Of the fifty-seven varieties of machine-made recre- 
ation that jump at us from every fence corner, per- 
haps the three that stand out head and shoulders 
above the rest are the movie, the auto, and the radio. 
In estimating their influence upon family life, the 
personal element necessarily enters largely, as only 
fractions of the field have been objectively and scien- 
tifically surveyed. The conclusions here presented 
are offered less as final judgment than as bases for 


234 CONCERNING PARENTS 


discussion and as suggestions for fuller investiga- 
tion. 

The movie is obviously an away-from-home recre- 
ation. It takes both child and parent out of the home 
for their play. Moreover, family parties are not the 
rule. More commonly the child goes at one hour of 
the day, the parent at another hour. And even where 
parent and child attend together, there is, at most, 
merely physical togetherness. Each looks for him- 
self. Each enjoys for himself. There is little joint 
activity, but rather a recreational passivity. Educa- 
tional influence has not much of a toehold here. 

On the other hand, it is probably true that with 
the passing of the saloon, which under some circum- 
stances—but by no means all, as our surveys of a 
decade ago showed—gravely harmed family life, 
many a father has found a much less harmful sub- 
stitute in the movie and, we may add, in the family 
auto. In so far the movie and the auto have in- 
directly and by way of substitution helped towards 
the upbuilding of wholesome home life. 

The radio may, I believe, from the standpoint we 
are considering, be put down as an unmixed blessing 
to family life. Like the movie it should probably be 
classified as passive play, but there is at least a cer- 
tain family “mineownness” about it. And most of 
all it has gone far to keep all the members of the 
family together and within the home walls. It has 
contributed notably to bring play back into the home, 
just as its distant cousin the victrola has done. 


EFFECT OF MACHINE-MADE RECREATION 235 


The case for the auto is less simply summed up. 
The auto has both sundered and spliced the family 
bonds and ties. The adolescent coddling of the 
middle-income or higher-income family, if entrusted 
with a high-power roadster and given carte blanche 
in its use, may or may not follow the trail of the 
proverbial beggar on horseback and ride it to hell, 
but certainly he or she races in seven-league boots far 
from the home threshold, often for the greater part 
of the leisure hours and days until home becomes 
reduced to twenty feet of curb with half-hour park- 
ing limits. The fond parents in the case have virtu- 
ally extended to their offspring a standing invitation 
to seek their recreation elsewhere than at home. 

The other side of the picture is not so dark. In 
fact, it is quite rose-colored. The auto has brought 
about a considerable revival of family outings such 
as in other days and in other ways were routine and 
healthy custom. When parents and children fare 
forth together in the family machine as is happening 
the country over on a vast scale, whether for an eve- 
ning spin, or for an all-day holiday outing, or for a 
ten-day touring and camping trip, we have, it seems 
to me, a very wholesome and very sound situation. 
The purring Packard or throbbing Ford carries par- 
ent and offspring far from the shadow of the ma- 
terial shelters that the suburban real estate promoter 
elects to advertise as homes, but it whirls them away 
in shared recreation. It keeps them together in their 
play. It makes them one in spirit and adventure. 


236 CONCERNING PARENTS 


It reenforces home loyalties by multiplying family 
group pleasures. In so far the auto has helped to 
light again the candles dimmed and blown out by the 
breath of the Iron Man. 

In another way too, the auto, in part as a recre- 
ational toy, has helped measurably to shore up the 
shaken home walls. It would perhaps be ungracious 
to say that our splendid housing reform movement, 
for all its labor, has been delivered of a mouse. But 
we all know how little we have accomplished thus far. 
Meanwhile the low-priced auto has come upon the 
scene. Its coming has been a central factor in re- 
lieving city housing congestion through the develop- 
ment of suburban residential tracts. Without the 
humble inexpensive auto development on such a 
gigantic scale would hardly have been possible or at 
least would have been put off to far distant days 
until more slowly expanding autobus or street rail- 
way service had risen to the need.- Perhaps our en- 
terprising fellow-citizen of Detroit may go down in 
American history less as a wizard in finance and cap- 
tain of industry than as a restorer of home life and 
binder of home ties. 

Side by side with shared play in the pre-industrial- 
ized home there flourished a host of shared labors, 
many of them of a manual or handcraft type. May 
we not justly chalk up to the credit of both the radio 
and the auto a certain partial return of manual and 
handcraft employment to the home? At any rate, 
the many hours spent each month by auto-owners and 


EFFECT OF MACHINE-MADE RECREATION 237 


radio enthusiasts, young and old, in the care and re- 
pair of these delicate and complex and balky and 
cantankerous bits of machinery are so much time de- 
voted to employment within the shadow of the home 
and often jointly spent in shared activity by parent 
and child,—to the confusion or glory of the amateur 
parental mechanician as the case may be! 

_ From quite another viewpoint than the one we 
have thus far been considering, from an angle much 
less directly connected with the industrial revolution 
and the consequent emptying of the home of its play 
and work activities, the auto and movie have pro- 
foundly affected and are still affecting family life. 

_ The wholesomeness of home and family life is 
largely determined by our ideals regarding it and by 
our ethical standards and conduct in the field of sex. 
A low and unworthy conception of family life leads, 
‘by a broad and well-paved boulevard, to low and 
unworthy actualities in family life. Low and un- 
worthy standards and conduct in the field of sex are 
a subtle, but in the long run the most deadly, enemy 
of high standards and conduct in family living. 
In how far, it may be asked, have the auto and the 
movie affected such conceptions, standards, and con- 
duct ? 

That the silver screen has done its part and more 
than its part in fomenting and spreading a cynical 
attitude, to put it at the mildest, towards marriage 
and family life, is a thesis that needs little laboring. 
Where the major blame lies, whether upon the con- 













238 CONCERNING PARENTS 


temptible money-grabbing exploitation of the morbid | 
and prurient bents in our common humanity, or upon 


| 


r 


if 


the clamant demands or weak-kneed docility of that — 


common humanity as registered at the box office, is 
not our question. The fact remains that the movie 
has done more than its ample share towards de- 
flowering the sanctities of the home. Nor can it claim 
innocence of the charge of having gone far to break 
down the barriers of reserve and reverence that safe- 
guard sex conduct, and of having gone far to swell 
in myriad ways the sum-total of sex delinquency. 
The whole fact is obvious to the casual observer and 
well sustained by a mass of concrete clinical and 
other evidence. 

But to be fair we must give the devil his due. 
Respecting the movie, many of us have so often 
felt our blood rise to the boiling point at the flagrant 
and coldly calculating exploitation of our human 
weakness, and have been so nauseated at the patent 
dishonesty and lying hypocrisy of the defence pleas 
set forth by leering promoters, that we have not 
cared to think much of the brighter side of the 
question. Yet it is well to recall that many an 
inartistic movie upholds high standards of love and 
chivalry and home. In connection with many of the 
crude and inartistic melodramatic movies, it is per- 
haps worth recalling Irvin Cobb’s plea for Old Cap 
Collier and his defence of the rip-roaring dime novel 
on the ground that it usually pictured the hero as 
temperate because he had to shoot straight and as 





EFFECT OF MACHINE-MADE RECREATION 239 


chivalrous to womankind because—perhaps the boy 
demanded this. 

Meanwhile let us thank God that the radio powers 
' that be have kept their product clean. This is an in- 
' calculable gain and all who have at heart the whole- 
| someness of family life should recognize it at its 
- full worth and give honor where honor is due. 

Of the auto as affecting ideals of and standards of 
family and sex it seems to me little need be said. The 
whole litany from pocketflask to roadhouse is fa- 
miliar to us all. Several years ago a discussion was 
on between two business men in one of our large 
eastern cities as to which had done more harm, alco- 
hol or gunpowder. In the midst of the argument, 
a third man entered and after listening a while 
chimed in, “Boys, you’re both wrong. It’s gasoline!” 
Without venturing an opinion as to whether or how 
far the auto has surpassed its rural predecessor, the 
buggy, as a moral corrosive, we may at least confi- 
dently credit it with pretty nearly one hundred per 
cent efficiency in this special field of action. 

In the foregoing summary we have tried to out- 
line briefly the broader and more obvious effects of 
machine-made recreation upon family life. That 
subtler influences have gone out from machine-made 
play and touched the life of the family is not im- 
probable, just as subtler influences have seemingly 
gone out from machine-made western culture and 
touched to the quick the modern Euro-American 
psyche. 


240 CONCERNING PARENTS 


From the rough review we have concluded, it 
would appear that machine-made recreation has 
helped and is helping both to make and to mar our 
modern occidental family life, but I gladly leave to 
others the delicate task of judging whether, all things 
considered, machine-made play has done more to 
make than it has done to mar our contemporary fam- 
ily life, or vice versa. Nor are we called upon to 
lay down any detailed program or practical measures. 
The measures called for, both the constructive ones 
to promote the good effects of machine-made recre- 
ation and the corrective ones to scotch and check its 
undesirable effects, are sufficiently obvious from the 
review of the effects themselves. 

Most of us feel moreover that the problem of ma- 
chine-made play is merely one small fragment of an 
enormously larger one, namely, the effects of our 
whole machine-made culture upon the home. We 
hear a great hue and cry about the loss of parental 
authority in the modern home. If only that were 
all! The last two centuries have begotten three 
major social revolutions; the political, the industrial, 
and the domestic—these three, and the greatest of 
these is the third. The domestic revolution has left 
upon the doorstep of our twentieth century the most 
puzzling and baffling waif of a problem that human- 
ity was ever perhaps called upon to look after. 


VACATIONS AS EDUCATIONAL 
OPPORTUNITIES 


By Mrs. Henry Moskowitz 


THE whole question of leisure time is one that is 
fraught with many ramifications both for adult and 
child. Leisure time brings out a certain freedom 
from responsibility which often produces a spon- 
taneity of conduct that we are not likely to see at 
any other time. The spring is released and it snaps 
back, and the child betrays traits of character that 
are perhaps entirely invisible to us in other relation- 
ships. The child at study, the child at school, the 
child at work, is sometimes an entirely different prod- 
uct from the child during its leisure moments, its 
playtime. 

Years ago, the thought was very strongly borne in 
upon us that vacations must be just playtime, that 
the school stopped and there was no other responsi- 
bility resting upon us as parents or upon children as 
children than to let them run wild for the two or 
three or, in some instances, even four months of 
leisure time. It often occurred to me to wonder, as 
I watched children growing up, what happened dur- 
ing those long three or four months of running wild, 
and how difficult it might or might not be to pick 


up again the habits of industry, the habits of study, 
241 


242 CONCERNING PARENTS 


the habits of work, that had been so carefully formed 
all through the preceding winter months. 

Most schools will probably agree that the few 
weeks just following vacation periods are among the 
most difficult of the school year. In fact, we have 
had increasing complaints in recent years from 
schools and colleges of the use which is made of 
vacation periods and appeals to parents to see to it 
that the children do not return to school or to college 
so worn out with the gayeties and the joys of vaca- 
tion times that they are utterly unfit for work for 
a long period of time afterward. 

Children’s nervous organisms are easily thrown 
out of adjustment. Not all of us have the normal, 
stable, easily regulated, easy-going children about 
whom we don’t have to think very much, who have 
the ordinary, normal reactions to life and work and 
play that we expect them to have. Many of us have 
children who are the products of nervously organized 
parents, and who carry with them through life the 
results of just the type of nervous inheritance which 
has been handed down from that kind of parent. 
Such children exist not only in a group, whose mem- 
bers have a certain amount of leisure time, but they 
exist all through society—rather unstable children 
whom the least variation from routine throws en- 
tirely off. 

The summer vacation period in this country is, 
first of all, too long. The private school which 
closes on the Ist of June and does not open again 





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: 
: 


: 
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- VACATIONS AS EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES 243 


until the first of October leaves parents with a real 
problem. 
_ I can remember, as a little girl, reading in St. 
Nicholas my first story about a vacation school. I 
can remember the impression it made on me—can 
| still see before me the pages of the magazine and the 
photographs which illustrated the article. I can still 
-remember wondering where these schools existed, 
to which one could go in the summer time, and 
learn to do the things that there never seemed 
‘to be time for during the winter months. In 
those days weaving, raffia, carpentry, sewing, were 
not part of the regular school curriculum. These 
were things for which we had no time in the daily 
school routine of our time. We never heard of them. 
| There was no place for them. A girl never learned 
at school to crochet and to knit and to make garments 
for her dolls. That “was not a part of her study. 
| That was something her grandmother possibly had 
time to teach her once in a while when there was an 
hour or two left over at home. But here was a school 
that actually let children do this as school work. 
There were teachers who taught them how to do it. 
That impressed me tremendously as a child, but it 
was not until many years later that I discovered 
where the vacation schools were where people were 
really doing these things. 
Our children, taking them in mass, divide them- 
selves, roughly speaking, into two large groups: the 
group of children whose parents have leisure and 











244 CONCERNING PARENTS 


can give them educational opportunity ; and the group 
of children whose parents have to depend upon what- 
ever resources of public education there may be, and 
who, after all, have themselves very little opportunity 
and very little education or cultural background. 
These parents simply have, if they think about it at 
all, a great desire that their children shall have the 
best that can be afforded for them, and they also 
have, just the same as the other type of parent, the 
problem of leisure time on their hands. 

Plenty of opportunity for play has fortunately 
come to mean something quite different to some of 
us. The child of the group which does not have 
leisure to study its children is to-day sometimes far 
better off than the child of the other group, just be- 
cause there are Child Study Associations interested 
in that child and because that child lends itself more 
easily to experimentation. The busy working parents 


are glad to be free of the child from early morning © 


until late in the afternoon, and have legitimate rea- 
sons for needing such relief. Therefore we have the 
opportunity to use that child in our laboratories, but 
it takes a long time before we learn to apply lessons 
so learned to our own children. 

These very vacation classes, of which I read in 
St. Nicholas so many years ago, were conducted only 


in the poorest districts of the city. The poor child — 


who needed to be kept off the streets, and to be given 
education and occupation in the summer time or dur- 
ing vacation periods, was, the child considered. 





VACATIONS AS EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES 245 






To-day, the vacation is being utilized much more 
intelligently by a larger majority of people than it 
ever has been before. The child living in the poorer 
| districts has many vacation opportunities. The pub- 
lic schools generally are open for playground pur- 
poses, for directed play, and for vacation schools, 
and, in New York City at least, the Child Study As- 
_ sociation has conducted probably the most important 
_ experiment that has been conducted anywhere. 
They have tried the experiment of play schools in 
the summer time. These schools have been organized 
not upon the basis of appealing to the child merely 
to keep off the streets and to come inside somewhere, 
to come indoors and have a good time, but they have 
a sound educational basis, reaching not only the child 
but the parents as well. 

The whole background, the whole fundamental 
idea of the play schools of the Child Study Associa- 
tion has been that through the child we must reach 
into the home and must get at the parent. If we 
teach the child to drink milk, we try to educate the 
mother at the same time, so that she will realize what 
kind of foods the child should have and how the 
child should use it. If we teach health and sanita- 
tion, we try to apply them to the actual home of the 
child. We try to make the child work out the things 
done in the schools on the basis of the home in which 
he lives. That is an intelligent use of vacation time. 

These children come into the play schools the 
sixth of July, after they have had a few days of 





246 CONCERNING PARENTS 


absolute running wild, and they are very glad indeed 
to come into the regular day’s routine of the play 
school. They come five days in the week, until the 
end of the month of August. 

The routine of indoor life in the schools is varied. 
Then there are picnics and outings and excursions to 
various places. Through the care and individual at- 
tention which is given each of these children, some- 
thing is learned about their physical and mental 
make-up that could not possibly be learned in the 
ordinary routine of the daily school life. 

What are we doing with the vacation periods of 
those children who do not come into the play schools, 
and for whom no play schools have been organized ? 
In recent years there has grown up a new movement 
which enables parents to increase their own leisure 
time in the summer months. We have been sending 
our older boys and girls and sometimes even our 
youngest boys and girls away from us for the sum- 
mer months to vacation camps of one kind or an- 
other. Iam leaving out of account now the vacation 
uses of the ordinary summer camp, used by the settle- 
ment or the social organization, which gives a child 
a two-weeks’ holiday, a change of environment, a 
change of companions. This camp has a sound edu- 
cational basis in everything that it does, and brings 
back a boy or a girl with an entirely new aspect of 
life. It means a widening of the horizon of the city- 
bred child, and has many, many lessons to teach these 
young boys and girls. 


VACATIONS AS EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES 247 


I am referring to the other type of camps—com- 
mercial camps—which have grown up like mush- 
rooms. With very little thought or consideration as 
to how these camps are organized, and with less 
thought than we would begin to give to the schools 
to which we send our children, we send them away 
from us to camp for two long months in the summer 
time. 

Sometimes it seems to me that these camps are 
only intended as a substitute for the summer hotel; 
that they merely give parents the opportunity to feel 
free of the responsibility of the children. This feel- 
ing that the child is entirely safe mentally and mor- 
ally and physically because it is under the care of a 
group of adults, and that therefore parents are free 
to go and do as they see fit for the summer months, 
is quite unwarranted. 

The camps are just one round of excitement, occu- 
pation, things to do. The camp director seems bent 
upon finding as many things as possible to keep the 
children busy. The vacation ends up usually, for 
girls especially, in a few crush friendships which 
wear out before very many months of the winter 
have passed, especially if the camp appeals to girls 
from many parts of the country who do not meet 
after camp season is over. With boys, this has 
rather frequently a somewhat deeper significance, 
and the friendships last somewhat longer, at least 
until the camp reunion in the winter time. The camp 
reunion is another grand occasion at which the chil- 


248 CONCERNING PARENTS 


dren all come together, and the one appeal that is 
made is, “Let’s all go back to the camp again next 
summer,” advisedly, on the part of the camp director. 

This does not seem to me to be an intelligent use 
of vacation time. It might be possible for some of 
the parents who are interested in child study to talk 
to camp directors and find out if we cannot make at 
least as intelligent use of these expensive and luxuri- 
ous opportunities for our children in the summer time 
as we have made of the play schools which cost the 
child who uses them practically nothing. 

Can we not get out of the summer camp some of 
the more beautiful uses of leisure time? Can we not 
get time for young girls to reflect, to think, to read, 
to grow, just simply to be themselves? Can we not 
get out of the summer camp a vacation opportunity 
for something that we may not have time to put into 
the lives of these boys and girls? Can we, instead of 
the so-called camp spirit (upon which everything 
seems to concentrate during these vacation periods) 
get something just a little more than camp cheer and 
the singing of the camp songs? Can we get out of 
it for every child (not just the exceptional child who 
gets something out of everything no matter where 
you put him) something that will last through the 
child’s life and be a really worthwhile influence—not 
merely a substitution of one continuous round of ex- 
citements for another? Some few camps organized 
by experienced and thoughtful educators have suc- 
ceeded in doing these things. But there are all too 


VACATIONS AS EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES 249 


many of the other type, hastily organized, poorly 
directed, carelessly planned and run for commercial 
purposes only. 

This problem of leisure time, of vacation periods, 
of course stresses itself to us not only as a summer 
problem, but as a winter problem as well, because we 
parents have to deal with the winter holiday and we 
have to deal with the spring holiday. These are only 
a matter of a week or two, but everywhere one meets 
mothers, full of excitement, full of things to do be- 
cause “John is coming home from school next week, 
and the children are all going to be home, and I am 
going to have them all on my hands for two weeks.” 
It means a continuous planning of parties, entertain- 
ments, theaters—and one hears the cry, “What shall 
Ido? Ican’t make any engagements. The children 
are going to be home,” as though a catastrophe were 
happening in their parents’ lives. 

Apparently the children have to be amused from 
the moment they get off the train until the moment 
that they go back again, so that they will be sure to 
feel that they have had a good time at home. Are 
we just a little bit afraid that home is not as attrac- 
tive as school? Are we afraid we must do all these 
things in order that the children shall want to come 
home to us during vacation periods? Have we our- 
selves forgotten how to use leisure time? Have we 
ourselves forgotten the best things that there are for 
us in vacation periods, the joy and the recreation that: 
there is in just a change of environment, a coming: 


250 CONCERNING PARENTS 


back or a going somewhere to see other people, to 
do new things, to do different things? Have we for- 
gotten that sometimes just having time to do things 
we have no opportunity to do in the regular routine 
of our daily lives is a vacation in itself? And have 
we forgotten how to teach that to our children? 
Have we forgotten how to teach them the joys of 
companionship and friendship? 

If we wanted to make a little effort ourselves, we 
could make intelligent and vital use of these vacation 
periods, using our homes as a background and utiliz- 
ing them as part of the picture, whether they be the 
long summer vacations or the shorter winter vaca- 
tions. Instead, it seems we try to make home the 
last place to which to go, the place in which to sleep, 
the place where you get up as late as possible in the 
morning and go to bed as late as possible at night, 
and of which you see just as little as possible in be- 
tween times. 

I have witnessed some of the struggles of mothers 
of older children during the vacation period in the 
summer months when boys and girls are home from 
college. The mother is a slave to making the neces- 
sary arrangements for the children’s “good time,” a 
slogan that we have worshiped for years, and wor- 
ship now as we perhaps have never worshiped it 
before. | 

I have heard some of the struggles of these weary 
mothers who have no time to do anything except to 
arrange that the servants shall be satisfied and happy, 


VACATIONS AS EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES 251 


that there shall be provision for as many people for 
lunch as somebody may want to bring in suddenly 
from the country club, that there shall be opportunity 
for riding, for swimming, for motoring, for guests, 
for everything that these young people want to do. 
There seems to be no thought at all that there might 
be an obligation on the part of these young people 
to make the vacation periods of their parents a little 
happier and a little more comfortable by means of 
their very presence and companionship. 

We might well take heed as to what we are doing 
with the leisure time of our own boys and girls dur- 
ing vacation periods and all other periods. It is all 
very well to discuss the problem of the boy and the 
girl who are the victims of a social environment that 
is perhaps not fortunate, who are the victims of con- 
gested living conditions and social maladjustment. 
It is all very well to reach out to help them, to estab- 


lish play schools and vacation schools and all the 





other opportunities for those boys and girls, and to 
think about where they will play and what they will 
do. But we have a problem of our own, in our own 


_ homes, with our own boys and girls. This ought to 


be, and is, just as big a problem for us, looked at 
not from the point of view of the children’s good 
time, but, just once in a while, from the point of 
view of the parents’ good time. 

The type of companionship which the older boy 


_ and girl is able to give and which we ought to culti- 


vate and ask for and value and want more than any- 


252 CONCERNING PARENTS 


thing else, is something that a great many of us seem 
to be putting away from us. Our one desire, our 
one thought, seems to be to keep these boys and girls 
busy away from the place where they ought to be, 
which is with us, with their lives revolving and cen- 
tering around what we are doing. Probably some 
of it is due to a little selfishness on our own part. 
We do not want to make the effort. We are reluc- 
tant to take time from other delightful and interest- 
ing and amusing things and give it to these boys and 
girls. We give our time to the little children because 
we feel that they physically need us. But the psy- 
chological needs, the deep psychic needs of these little 
children as they grow up, we alone ought to be the 
ones to meet. There is no substitute, there is no 
camp director, there is no camp counsellor in the 
whole world who can give these young boys and girls 
the kind of thing that an intelligent, thoughtful, con- 
siderate home environment can give them. 

And so the play school of the Child Study Asso- 
ciation has a unique value, because it does not try 
to divorce the child from the parent. It tries to 
reach out for the parent through the child, to bring 
them together, to teach them to live together, to 
show them that they have interests in common, that 
there are things they can do together, thus bridging 
that separation between the younger generation and 
the older generation which the older generation has 
itself brought about. 


Pi) VEL 
THE PARENTS’ OUTLOOK ON LIFE 















SUGGESTED READING FOR PART VI 


Guidance of Childhood and Youth—Compiled by Child 
Study Association of America, Edited by B. C. 
Gruenberg ; Macmillan, 1926. 

ores Instruction of Children—Felix Adler; Appleton, 
1892. 

The Child: His Nature and His Needs—Edited by M. 
V. O’Shea; Children’s Foundation, 1925. 

Human Nature and Conduct—John Dewey; Holt, 1922. 

Psychology and Morals—J. A. Hadfield; McBride, 1925. 

The Foundations of Personality—Abraham Meyerson; 

Little, Brown, 1923. 





THE PARENTS’ OUTLOOK ON LIFE 


THE way in which parents earn their living and 
pay their rent affects the character of the child more 
than the way they say their prayers. The relation 
between the child’s father and mother affects the 
child’s spiritual nature more than anything else I 
know of. What the parents are is what gets over 
_ to the child—and how do they express what they are 
except in their business and family and personal re- 
lationships? 

Until business and the professions have become 
an integral part of the spiritual life of the race, we 
will never give to our children what we most would 
like them to have: the belief that this is a good life. 
There is a feeling on the part of many young people 
that religion is not what it used to be. The only 
possible way for parents or teachers to make them 
believe that the spiritual power in the world lives, is 
to live it. Our challenge is to imprint upon the so- 
ciety about us what we believe is the right thing. 
And only as we try to make that impression, does 
the child get something. 

An important reason for a woman’s having a 
career is that she may, through her outside work, 
have something more to teach the child; that she may 
through being a good leader, learn to be a good 

255 


256 CONCERNING PARENTS 


' mother. So also, the father, to be a good parent, 
must be a good business man. 

There is a difference between a moral vocabulary 
. and a good life. Parents and teachers have learned 
a moral vocabulary. That is easy, but to live a life 
good enough in its social aspects as well as in its 
individual aspects, to be a parent or a teacher, is a 
tremendous challenge. We may not succeed in cre- 
ating a coOperative commonwealth or the City of 
Light, but the. genius of our attempt will get across 
to the children. They will catch fire, and then that 
holy thing, the spirit of a good life, will be born in 
them, as we try, not as we teach. 

Joun Lovejoy Extiott, Px.D., 
Headworker, Hudson Guild, 
New York City. 





IS RELIGION UNITING OR 
SEPARATING US? 


By Georce A. Cor, Px.D. 


Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia 
University 


THE experience of parenthood, whenever it is 
raised to the plane of reflection, tends to bring to a 
focus the question, “‘What is my ideal for my child, 
and what therefore is the central meaning of life?” 

Many a parent who pursues for himself a given 
life-policy hesitates to teach his children to pursue it. 
Occasionally parents who do not subscribe to a given 
faith send their children to be instructed in it lest 
perchance some life-value should be missed. With 
considerable—and probably increasing—frequency 
the complaint is made, “I should like to have my 
children religiously nurtured, but I don’t know what 
to teach them, and I am not satisfied with the sort 
of teaching that is provided by the various sects.” 

There is, without doubt, a great deal of what has 
been called “inarticulate religion” that is not quite 
content to remain inarticulate, especially in the pres- 
ence of children’s questions. Even within the re- 
ligious bodies there is much questioning concerning 
the wisest approach to children. In fact, few 

257 


258 CONCERNING PARENTS 


thoughtful persons are satisfied either with prevail- 
ing types of religious education or with the neglect 
of it. 

Where, then, lies the open road for the parent who 
believes that the deepest truth of life lies somewhere 
within religion yet distrusts his own ability to inter- 
pret it? What open road is there for those of us 
who cannot utter our whole souls in the hoary terms 
of authority; who, though we feel the thrill of 
stately ceremonial and sacramental worship, remain 
cold to its implications; whose temperament, or 
whose acquaintance with the psychology of mystic 
openings, makes the contemplative life an impossi- 
bility for us; who find help, indeed, in the nature- 
mysticism that dwells upon our unity with the whole 
stream of life, yet obtain here no adequate clew to 
the specific meaning of the life that is human? If 
philosophy is too deep for us, or too uncertain, does 
it follow that our way is simply blocked? What 
shall we do who experience within historical religious 
institutions a fellowship that is too precious to be 
renounced, yet too narrow, too much conditioned by 
the past, to be clearly best for our children? 

It would be foolish to think that one can give a 
rounded answer to this question at the present time; 
but the fellowship that arises from devotion to a 
great human problem—simply as human—suggests 
that possibly a single step might be taken. 

Suppose, for example, that we start with the pain- 
ful fact that religion, or what is called religion, 





: 
} 


| 
: 


: 


IS RELIGION UNITING OR SEPARATING US? 259 


divides men into factions, creates animosities, and 
dries up the springs of sympathy. In the presence 
of children—so confiding in us adults, so capable of 
friendliness with everybody and everything, yet so 
prone to absorb the prejudices of those whom they 
love—in the presence of children, how shall we deal 
with the divisive aspect of religion? The facts press 
upon the child’s attention whether we will or no. 
He sees the diverse places of worship; learns of 
diverse Sunday schools; hears echoes of religious 
controversies; associates prejudice of race with re- 
ligious partisanship. If we could assemble at this 
moment our own childhood notions of religious dif- 
ferences, what a museum they would make! And 
what a warning they would give us! We should see 
that the religious separation of neighbor from neigh- 
bor is kept going in large measure by what happens 


in the experience of young children. Herein cur- 


rent religion, wittingly or unwittingly, takes an un- 


fair advantage of the child’s innocence as does that 


_ other trouble-maker, race prejudice. 


In view of the religious condition of the world, 


_and not least the condition of our own country, is it 


not time for parents to bestir themselves to protect 
their children from every institution, custom, and 
notion that inherently tends to postpone friendliness 
among all men? To protect children, not by silence, 
not by social segregation, but by direct and positive 
prophylaxis? Yes, and to do this in the name of 
religion! 


260 CONCERNING PARENTS 


I am moved to plainness of speech because I am 
neither a secularist nor an indifferentist but an ad- 
herent of an ancient religion and a member of a re- 


ligious fellowship. Why should we who believe in® 


religion hesitate to see and to say that religion is one 
of the most dangerous things in the world? It is 
dangerous because, dealing as it does with the most 
precious things in life, its blunders are most disas- 
trous. The electric current that illuminates our dark- 
ness can set fire to our dwelling or bring instant death 
to our loved ones. So religion can sanctify our 
faults and raise them to the uth degree. So we 
see it making a virtue of beliefs and practices that 
destroy neighborliness and generate hate. Therefore 
it is necessary to draw sharply, even with children, 
a line of demarcation between phases or types of re- 
ligion that unite men and those that separate them. 
Let us turn now to contemplation of the fact that 
to promote fellowship is in truth one of the very 
common aspects of religion. We should be unfair 
if we did not have eyes to see that the religious stock- 
ades are yielding on many sides to pressure from 
within outwards. Consider such facts as these: the 
amalgamation of several denominations into the 
United Church of Canada; interdenominational 
bodies like the Federal Council of Churches; unde- 
nominational societies like the Religious Education 
Association ; the recent Stockholm Conference, which 
united in the discussion of practical world-problems 
representative men from bodies that have been antag- 





IS RELIGION UNITING OR SEPARATING US? 261 


onistic for centuries; the increasing frequency with 
which Jews and Christians mingle in both humani- 
tarian work and worship; a new birth of religious — 
concern for justice in industrial relations; the in- 
creasing ease with which students from all parts of 
the world engage in friendly discussion of religion; 
the transformation now going on in the attitude of 
missionaries towards other religions, and especially 
the attitude of many missionaries in China who de- 
sire to renounce all extraterritorial rights for them- 
selves; the revival of oriental religions, with its 
reassertion of the humanitarian elements therein, 
and with its broad hospitality towards all faiths; 
finally, the beginnings here and there of a commu- 
nity religious consciousness. These incidents and 
trends must be placed over against the divisiveness 
that we deplore. 

Here an aboriginal aspect of religion is reasserting 
itself under new world-conditions. In its earlier 
forms religion was a phase of the general social life. 
The every-day contacts and common _ interests 
summed themselves up in sacred ceremonies and tra- 
ditions. Togetherness as such was religious. The 
common interest in the chase, in catching fish, in 
seed-planting and harvest, in war, in pestilences, in 
natural phenomena that frightened or over-awed— 
the common interest, whatever it was, gladdening or 
saddening, was of the substance of religion, and the 
social organization was consequently a religious 
organization. 


262 CONCERNING PARENTS 


How this religious unity was disturbed when dif- 
ferent tribes or racial stocks endeavored to live to- 
gether; how great religions arose around the per- 
sonalities of prophets; how these religions, often en- 
tangled with the political power, became competitors 
of one another; how in our western world religions 
have split into sects so that it has become necessary 
for the state to become religiously neutral—all this 
isan old story. Old, likewise, is the longing for res- 
toration of the lost religious unity. Thus the pres- 
ent divisiveness has many historical roots, so that 
many sorts of reconsideration will be necessary be- 
fore we can restore to religion the friendliness that 
alone is wholeness. 

Two sorts of necessary reconsideration may be 
mentioned as specimens. The first concerns those of 
us who count ourselves monotheists. Let us ask our- 
selves whether we attribute racial, or nationalistic, 
or partisan qualities to God, and whether, perhaps 
without our realizing what is happening, children also 
do it. Whatever philosophy or creed we subscribe to, 
our working religion is not truly monotheistic unless 
our worship attributes to God qualities that posi- 
tively transcend and rebuke the forces and the mo- 
tives that separate men. 

A second, closely-related line of reconsideration 
concerns our attitudes with respect to the simplest, 
most rudimentary conditions of living, such as eat- 
ing and drinking. In the beginning sowing and 
reaping and the joy of in-gathering were not sep- 







IS RELIGION UNITING OR SEPARATING US? 263 


| arate from worship, and the reason is that they were 
social, not individualistic, affairs. The sacramental 
| partaking of bread and of the fruit of the vine in our 
sanctuaries to-day is a distant derivative from a re- 
| ligiously robust, if crude, past in which the whole 
industry of the farmer and the vine-dresser were 
| suffused with religious, because social, meaning. 
| But in as far as men went into a hostile scramble 
for food, spiritual unity became impossible. Then 
| religion retired from the wheat-field, the threshing 
‘floor, the market. The economic order assumed to 
| derive its meaning from within its separate self, and 
} religion likewise undertook to support itself from 
| within itself as a merely special aspect of living. 

| Now, is it at all conceivable that religion can fulfill 
| its functions in the promotion of world-wide fellow- 
| ship; is it possible ever to achieve a working mono- 
| theism, unless the bread that sustains us is recognized 
| as a common interest, therefore sacred, and there- 
| fore a main sphere for the cultivation of the spirit- 
ual life? Thus, one of our most vital questions is: 
| What, to our children, is the significance of eating 
|and drinking, and of the economic activities that 
| sprout therefrom? 

| Tagore, saturated with the spirituality of the 
Orient, sings: 


Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! 
Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner 


264. CONCERNING PARENTS a 


of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and © 
see; thy God is not before thee! 

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground 
and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is 
with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is 
covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even 
like him come down on the dusty soil! 


and separates men; that the early experiences of chil- — 
dren are capable of giving them a set in one or other 
of these directions; that we cannot afford to let di- 
visive forces have their own way, nor to ignore the 
power of religion to promote human unity; finally, © 
that parents may have a large part in determining — 
the issue here involved. 


The sum of the matter is that religion both unites 






/'PARENTS, THE CONSTANT AND INEVI- 
| TABLE EDUCATORS OF THEIR 
CHILDREN *” 


By ANNA GARLIN SPENCER 


Lecturer and Author of “The Family and Its Members,” etc. 


In meetings of teachers there is a custom, almost 
| a habit, of snubbing parents. They are often alluded 
‘to as “troubles” or “difficulties.” Well, they are, 
| but so occasionally are teachers and children. 
Even if parents do need very much to be improved, 
| there is one thing that even the teachers must admit 
| they are a biologic necessity. If there were no par- 
| ents, there could be no children, and no educative 
| process, and no developing science of pedagogy. So 
| that at their worst and least, we have to get along 
| with them. At their most and best, they educate chil- 
| dren as they cannot be educated by any other in- 
| fluence, to higher and finer and more enduring issues 
| than can come through any other channel. 
| Moreover parents are not only inevitable as a 
| means by which the current of life passes on, but the 
parents you are born to are, as the children say, “for 
_ keeps’; you can’t change them. No process of the 
| divorce court or of the foster home arrangement, 
not even the nameless parenthood of some unknown 
| ae 


266 CONCERNING PARENTS 


father of the child of an unmarried mother, can pre- 


vent the inheritance flowing through the two people 
who together conspire to make a new life. 

We used to think, and conscientious parents were 
very much afflicted by the thought, that only those 


two people, the immediate father and the immediate — 


mother, were responsible for the children, especially 
when they went wrong. But now we know better. 
This mysterious current of germ-plasm may give us 


a great-grandfather or a great-grandmother in some © 


child that is so unlike its father and mother that we 
hardly know where it could come from. 


Our area of inheritance is enlarged, and we share | 


responsibility way back through the two parents and 
the two sets of grandparents and the four sets of 
great-grandparents, and so on, in a geometrical ra- 
tio. To-day, we may have a child, a mystic, a holy 


rebel, born of the most safe and sane and conserva- | 


tive people that ever walked the middle of the road. 
They don’t know always what to do with him, but 


somebody somewhere started him, and he will go on — 


until he joins a great company of those who are 
like him. 


We not only have to keep our parents whether we — 


want to or not; we also have to keep our children. 
A little boy five years of age was confronted with 
the experience of seeing for the first time his little 
brother two days old. He had been prepared for 
the great advent, perhaps a little injudiciously. His 
anticipations were very high. When he saw the 


PARENTS, EDUCATORS OF THEIR CHILDREN 267 


baby, he was disappointed, and finally burst out, “Oh, 
Mumsy! Throw it away and take another chance.” 

He had just been to a church sociable where they 
had had a grab bag, and he added, “I have enough in 
my bank for another grab.” 

“Well,” his father said, “my son, you didn’t look 
any better than that when you were two days old. 
I remember distinctly.” 

The little fellow stopped, and he said, “Is that so, 
daddy? Is that really so?” 

“Yes,” said the father, “that is so. You didn’t 
weigh quite as much, if I remember correctly.” 

“Well,” he said, “if that is so, then let’s keep him 
and see what he will come to.” 

The little boy thought he was settling the matter, 
but of course we know that he would be disillusioned 
a little later on, and he would know that nobody set- 
tles it after the child is here. To-day even the State 
says, “A child that is born shall live and be cared 
for, even if it was thrown out on an ash heap to 
die.”’ 

So we cannot change our parents or our children | 
in the original parcel, but of course many things can 
be done through nurture and environment toward 
establishing the right kind of development. How 
much we can do to modify inheritance, how much 
we can do to make an environment to which a natu- 
ral response will lead in the direction of a true and 
happy life, no one knows. We have never yet tried 
it far enough along. It is up to us to take every 


268 CONCERNING PARENTS 


child that is here, wherever we find it, and do the 
very best we can to bring out everything that we 
want to see developed in the child, to help the child 
to rid himself of anything we would rather not see. 
That we have all accepted as our duty, but we have 
become so deeply interested in the nurture side that 
we have not always realized how much it means to 
- children to have parents. 
I remember a little girl to whom was read the 
story of Kris Kringle. In the story Kris Kringle 
has a large book in which he writes the names of 
all the good children and only they have Christmas 
presents. The little girl’s eyes filled with tears. She 
had recently had an experience which had made her 
doubt her own infallibility and her own good be- 
havior, and she said, “Only the very good children 
would have Christmas presents?” 

“Well,” I said, “that is in the story. That is the 
way it reads.” 

After a minute, her face cleared, and she smiled 
and said, “Well, their mothers would give them 
something anyway.” 

Now, it is a mighty fine thing for all of us to 
have somebody who appreciates us better than we de- 
serve, who knows what we mean to try to do and to 
be, even when we don’t succeed. There has been 
something in the fatherhood and motherhood of the 
race which has given children an assurance that they 
were wanted on this crowded earth, 

The parents may have made many mistakes in 





_ PARENTS, EDUCATORS OF THEIR CHILDREN 269 


bringing up the children. They may have cuffed 
them on the ear one minute and kissed them the 
| next. They may have fed them very poorly. They 
may have been too ignorant to do what their love 
| would prompt. But at bottom they have inspired in 
| their children a conviction that somehow or other 
| there has come to them the supreme thing in life: a 
| great affection. 

| Now, let us not be so scientific and so improved 
that we shall fail to recognize the worth and value 
| of this natural tie. Think, when we deal with the 
| destitute and the disadvantaged, how we bank upon 
| mother love; not quite so much upon father love 
| although sometimes it is very good. But we bank 
| upon mother love, and we consider it an astonishing 
| thing for a mother to desert her children. She may 
| treat them so ignorantly that very wise people want 
| to take them away from her, but, at the same time, 
_she does the best she knows how because she loves 
| greatly. 


Let us remember that all education begins with _ 


| what the scientific people call “interest” and what I 
| call “affection.’”’ They are the two sides of some- 
thing that draws us out. We are interested intel- 
| lectually in something we want to learn. We are 
_ affectionately drawn to somebody or something that 
responds to the emotion of our hearts. So the first 
thing that we must set down as a social asset in the 
family relation is affection. 

Another reason why we must still look upon par- 


270 CONCERNING PARENTS 


ents as of importance is that for the most part, in the 
overwhelming majority of families, they are with 
their children more than any schoolmaster or mis- 
tress can be with them. The nursery school is be- 
coming popular, and there is an increasing tendency 
to consider the value of group training for the young 
child, but that applies only to a very small number 
of children in the midst of great cities where there 
is a high social organization. It is true the world 
over, and in our own country as well as others, that 
the overwhelming majority of children are born and 
brought up in rural communities, or small villages, 
or small suburban towns, and that the mothers still 
have to give the larger part of their attention and 
their lives to the actual work of bringing up the chil- 
dren and taking care of the homes. 

Also, it is true that what the parents are means 
more to the children than all the other influences 
combined; not what the parents say but what the 
parents are. Ifa father shows that he cares more to 
beat somebody else in an economic bargain than he 
does to keep his honor bright and his sense of jus- 
tice keen, the boy or girl will understand it. If the 
mother shows she cares more for some convention- 
ality than she does for absolute right and wrong, 
the boy and girl will know it. Some of us have a 
great heritage in what our parents and our grand- 
parents have been. We remember how our forbears 
stood against wrong opinion in times when it cost 
something to be frank and honest regarding one’s 


PARENTS, EDUCATORS OF THEIR CHILDREN 271 


belief, how our parents and grandparents sacrificed 
the small things for the great things in life. Be 
glad if you have in your blood such a gift. But if 
you haven’t, make sure your children have it, that 
they shall see when they look back in their old age 
(and then is when people look back most keenly) 
that whenever a crisis decision had to be made, their 
parents were on the right side. There isn’t anything 
else you can give to your children that is worth more 
than that, not anything. 

Then, besides, we ought to recognize that parents 
have a harder time in keeping the ideals they choose 
to present to their children, if they differ from the 
ordinary point of view, than they ever had before. 
In the old days the social mores were a despotic in- 
fluence. To-day, in Oriental countries, they are 
growing less. That which was the thing to do, in 
an ancient civilization, was a thing that had to be 
done, and everybody could concentrate simply upon 
the doing of what was expected of him. That is no 
longer true. Especially is it no longer true in the 
United States of America, because the social mores 
that are developed by this great cosmopolitan blend 
we call American life are so widely divergent that 
nobody knows exactly what is the right thing to do, 
because so many people are saying such different 
things. 

Moreover, isolation of the family is no longer pos- 
sible. It used to be true that you could build a wall 
around your own people and your children could 


272 CONCERNING PARENTS 


draw in the influence of a certain specific type of 
character. That is not true any longer. Every 
modern invention has made it impossible for any 
family to live and work by itself. Of course we 
know that, but we do not always estimate what it 
means in terms of ethical life and direction. We 
see that we must all get together, to learn how to 
work together, for the best type of life. Nobody 
can have an idea by himself any longer. It used to 
be thought that you could save a soul by picking it 
up individually from a place of danger and putting it 
over into a place of safety. Most people know that 
that time has gone by. 

All of us regret, as many of us have reason to, 
the inflowing of all the mixed tides of low concep- 
tions, ignorant ideas and self-seeking ways of living, 
upon our homes; and their effect upon our young 
people. We must come together and learn how to 
make a better world, the influences flowing from 
which will make our own children and our own 
homes what we want them to be. 


FREEDOM FOR THE CHILD—WHAT DOES 
IT MEAN? 


By DorotHy CANFIELD FISHER 


Ir is characteristic of the twentieth century that 
experts should be turning their attention to the regu- 
lation of home life and the bringing up of children, 
and it is a very good thing. Parents have been left 
too long to run this business of bringing up chil- 
dren without the restraining influence of the estimate 
of other people of their value. But their hour has 
struck. The skids are under them. Experts are be- 
ginning to look into the matter. 

Personally, 1 am delighted to see experts poking 
their noses into what formerly was not considered 
any of their business or anybody’s business—that is, 
the relation of parents to children. The point is, it 
is not only their business; it is everybody’s business, 
because everybody (whose other name is society) is 
affected by what happens inside the home between 
parents and children. Even sacred business efficiency 
is affected, and when business efficiency is threatened 
it is time for all good men to come to the aid of 
their country. And other things, perhaps even as im- 
portant as business efficiency—such as art, religion, 
scientific research, physical health and 'the stamina of 

273 


274 CONCERNING PARENTS 


the nation are being affected. It is high time that 
experts took a hand. 

What is it that these experts and parents alike 
are trying to bring about? What have they been 
trying to do for the last thirty years? Briefly, they 
are trying to understand their children as well as to 
love them; they want to know what kind of phe- 
nomenon a child is before they try to direct it. They 
have been trying to apply a little of the scientific 
spirit of research which bids you examine what sort 
of facts you have to deal with before you try to deal 
with them. 

What have they learned? First of all, they have 
found out that children need activity. Everybody 
knew they liked it long ago. What is new is the con- 
ception that possibly children are averse to remaining 
silent and motionless for the same reason that fish 
are averse to remaining out of water—because it 
means death to them. 

They have found out, too, that children thrive bet- 
ter not only if they are active, but if they are active 
in something interesting, something that seems to 
them worth while. Parents and educators have al- 
ways known that children have a perverse liking for 
doing what seems worth while and interesting to 
them, rather than performing drudgery that is im- 
posed on them from the outside. But it has been 
considered, until lately, just another evidence of 
natural depravity which had to be chastened out of 
them by their educators and teachers. The idea is 








FREEDOM FOR THE CHILD 275 


_ anew one that they may become morally ill if they 
are kept steadily at drudgery which has no meaning 
_ for them, just as much as they may become physi- 
cally ill if they are fed steadily on coffee and pickles 
and doughnuts. 
Parents and teachers have learned that what fits 
one child doesn’t fit another. That knowledge has 
_ been formulated a long time ago in the saying, 
_ “What is one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” 
but only recently has it been demonstrated so dra- 
- matically in the life of children under observation 
that people have come to really feel that it is true. 
Then it has been found out that one of the ele- 
_ ments ehildren need in their lives is some form of 
creative activity. A great deal of what used to be 
called their natural destructiveness came from the 
_ fact that they had to have material out of which 
to make things, even if they had to tear other things 
to pieces to get it. They like to make things rather 
_ than to own them and the possession of a material 
object does not make them either so happy or so 
_ well as some reasonable and interesting occupation. 
_ This is the sort of thing for which all of us, par- 
ents and experts alike, are fighting with a sort of 
crusaders’ ardor. And the possibility occurs to me 
that we may be fighting our crusade for something 
even greater than a normal human life for every 
child. It may be that there is inherent in this a fight 
for a normal human life for every human being! 
Parents, when they are working just toward the 


276 CONCERNING PARENTS 


benefit of their own children, seem to have no feel- 
ing towards any of the dark problems of industrial 
maladjustment or the materialism of the twentieth 
century. But there is a possibility that what they 
are trying to do for children will ultimately prove to 
be what we need for grown-up people. Every time 
we see a sickly baby turned into a healthy one by 
giving it the right food and life, every time a child 
is brought up in an ordinary, normal home and lives 
month after month without any recurrent spasms of 
those old savage impulses to wrongdoing that were 
considered inherent in human life, there is one more 
proof of the idea that if the social organization pro- 
duces a great many bad, dull, listless, futile, unhappy 


_ human beings, perhaps the fault is with the organi- 


* zation and not inherently with the human beings. 
We parents have very little contact with abstract 
ideas, but we constantly see in our family life some- 
thing that looks like a proof of this statement. We © 
are going to question conditions traditionally sup- 
posed to be inevitable in grown-up life because we © 
have seen ills healed that were traditionally connected 
with childhood. The improvement, for instance, — 
of the health of the child under a year of age since 
intelligence has been turned on it is a dramatic thing 
in human life. We have begun to understand that — 
the same thing applies to older children. Just as the 
baby who keeps the family awake all night crying — 
from colic has almost disappeared, so the old fierce — 
fits of anger that used to be considered an essential 








FREEDOM FOR THE CHILD 277 


part of little children’s lives are fast disappearing. 
Experts are pointing out that the same thing applies 
to school children and adolescents. If they are given 
the necessary mental, moral and physical food, con- 
ditions and activities which they need, the problem 
of delinquency will be diminished far beyond what 
we can imagine. 

Then what? When they are twenty-one and tra- 
ditionally as much adults as we are, are we going to 
throw those children into the hopper of an industrial 
organization which doesn’t even pretend that the 
welfare of its members is its real aim—which says, 
“Yes, develop yourself if you can, but that is a by- 
product; the real thing is to produce more goods.” 
This generation of parents is going to do that be- 
cause we can't help it. It takes longer than one gen- 
eration to do anything. But we are not going to 
admit as our parents did that it is inevitable. 

We have learned that if we shut our little boy in 
the house, keep him at a sedentary task which he does 
not see any interest in, allow him no hope for any- 
thing else, he will become sickly mentally, morally 
and physically, and he will acquire all sorts of queer 
complexes, much easier to prevent than to cure. 
When we see a boy of twenty-one put in exactly 
that position, we are going to think a little more 
just what it means. He also is set into a sedentary 
life, in front of a machine or in front of a desk, 
according to the amount of money we have, doing 
over and over a task the sole value of which is com- 


278 CONCERNING PARENTS 


mercial. His big, active body, that we have tried so 
hard to develop, will become an anachronism just as 
much as the appendix and consequently just as liable 
to mortal disease. 

A larger group of ordinary people are going to 
question whether the production of goods and of 
commercial prosperity is worth any such human 
price. We have been told that it “necessarily” costs 
that price. But we do not take that word “necessa- 
rily” as seriously as we used to. Too many of the 
‘ evils that “necessarily” were connected with child- 
hood have disappeared with intelligent handling. 

Every blow that is struck for the essentials of life 
for children—freedom, individuality, opportunity 
for creation—may be a blow toward shaping the 
idea that everybody needs these essentials. We are 
driven to try to understand our children’s needs by 
our inborn love for them, and it may be that we are 
learning in this way to understand the needs of our 
fellow man in whom we have not the same natural, 
instinctive, ardent interest. Every time we make an 
effort to understand our children before we try to 
direct them it may be that we are deepening the 
groove in the collective mind along which runs the 
as yet very dim idea that it might be just as well to 
try to understand human beings before you try to 
govern them. 

We have proved again and again in our children’s 
lives that it is creative occupation and not material 
possession which gives them health and happiness. 


a 


FREEDOM FOR THE CHILD 279 


Possibly our hard heads are beginning to conceive 
the fact that that is true of everybody and that we 
are on the wrong track when we try to make people 
happy by making them materially prosperous. Every 
time we prove that being a baby does not necessarily 
mean having colic, that being a. little boy does not 
necessarily mean having an outbreak of savagery at 
least once every day, it may be that we are helping 
prove that being a human being does not necessarily 
mean working at a job that you do not like, in order 
to keep on living a life that you find very dull and 
flat. 

It may be that parents—unscientific, fumbling, 
amateur parents—are in the laboratory of the home 
discovering some of the essentials of human life and 
that they will help to demonstrate that if such essen- 
tials are provided, possibly the majority of the 
human race will be neither futile nor noxious, but 
happy and useful, which is more than can be said 
for them now. 





INDEX 


A 


Activity, creative, 275 

Adolescence, Merrill and Sea- 
shore on, 225 

Adolescence, Meuman on, 225 

Adjustments of later adoles- 
cence, 137-159 

Adolescent, the, 7I- Eo 
159, 220, 222, 224, 229 

Alice, 129-133 

Association, learning by, 204- 
206 

Association, Progressive Edu- 
cation, 165 

Associations, child study, 244, 
245, 252 

Auto, effect on home, 
235-236, 237, 239 


B 


137- 


233; 


Binet Test, Terman Revision 
of, 167, 168 

Boston University, 83 

Brunswick, Duchess of, 12 

Bureau of Children’s Guid- 
ance, 118 

Burney, Frances, 225 

Burnham, William H., 52, 217, 
224 


C 


Camp vacation, 246, 247, 248 

Catholic University, 231 

Chicago, University of, 34 

Child freedom, 273-279 

Child growth, 199-201 

Child Study Associations, 244, 
245, 252 


Child Welfare Institute, 220 


Heaiter from, to youth, 
I18-1 
Childhood, psychology of, 


Children’s Guidance, Bureau 
of, 118 

Clark University, 217, 220 

Cobb, Irvin, 238 

Coe, George A., Ph.D., 257 

College, Smith, 24, 28 

Columbia University, 71, 
166, 195, 257 . 

een family and, 47- 


164, 


Community forces, 83-94 

Cooper, John M., Ph.D., 231 

Cramming, 188-189, I90, I9QI, 
193 

Creative activity, 275 


D 


Darwin, 226-227 
Dick, 109-114 
Discipline, newer 
of, 195-212 
Dog, Pawlaw’s, 204 
“Domestic Conflict and Its 
Effect on Children,” 107 
Duchess. of Brunswick, 12 
“Dynamic ’ Psychology, Prob- 
lems in,” 104 


E 


meanings 


Early years, importance of, 99- 
117 

Ectogenesis, 9 

Education, parental, 265-272 

Education, religious, 257 


281 


282 


Education, teachers and chang 
ing, 163-164 

Ego, I0, 14, 19, 22, 186 

Elliott, John Lovejoy, 256 

Emancipation from home, 138- 
149, 159 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quot- 
ed, 165 

Europe, women in, 40, 42 


F 


Family, 3-23, 32 

Family and community, 47-48 

“Family and its Members, 
The,” 265 

Family life, 40 

Family life, recreation on, 23I- 
240 

Father in home, 31-43 

Fear-complex, 185 

Fear of woman, 10, II 

Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, 273 

Feminist, 25 

Flapper psychology, 125 

Forces, community, 231-240 

Frankel, Dr. Lee K., 216 

Frazer, 36 

Freedom, child, 273-279 

Laan Francis Mitchell, 
105 


G 


Gans, Bird S., 98 

“Golden Bough,” 36 

Groves, Ernest R., Ph.D., 83 
Group, individual in the, 177- 


194 
Growth, child, 199-201 
H 


Haldane, Viscount, 9 

Hall, Dorothy E., 107 

Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, 
231 


INDEX 


Health, 4 

Henton, Miss, 60, 61 

Herald, New York, 226 

Hetero-sexuality, 138, 149-152, 
154-159 

Hilly Dr: Patty*S4. 164 

Hinkle, Beatrice M., M.D., § 

“History of European Mor- 
als,” 39 

Hobhouse, 32 

Hollingworth, Leta S., Ph.D., 
71 

Home, effect of auto on, 233, 
235-236, 237, 239; movie on, 
234, 237, 238; radio on, 234, 
237, 230 Cie 

Home, emancipation 
138-149, 159 

Home, father in, 31-43 

Home, mother in, 24-30 

Howes, Ethel Puffer, Ph.D., 


from, 


24 
Hygiene, mental, 99, IOI, 102, 
116 


I 
Importance of early years, 99- 
117 
Individual in group, the, 175- 


104 
Institute, Child Welfare, 220 
Intelligence tests, 166 


J 


Janet, Pierre, 33, 35 
Jazz, 227-228 

John, 60, 61 

“Judgments, Subjective,” 


K 
Kenworthy, Marion E., M.D., 


118 
Kilpatrick, William Heard, 
Ph.D., 195 


169 


INDEX 


Kindergarten, 172, 
180 

Kleitman, Dr., 34 

Kohler, Dr., 35 


L 


173, 179, 


Learning by association, 204- 
206 

Lecky, 39 

Leisure and recreation, 
216 


Life, parents’ outlook on, 255- 


256 
Ludovici, Anthony, 8, 9, 12 
“Lysistrata,” 8 


M 


Mary, 133-135 
Mayo, Elton G., 31 
McCurdy, John T., 104 


Mental hygiene, 99, 101, 102, 
116 
Mental Hygiene, National 


Committee for, 137 
Memory, recall-, 193 
Memory, recognition-, 193 
Merrill and Seashore on ado- 

lescence, 225 
Merrill-Palmer School, 49 
“Mind, The Normal,” 52 
Meuman on adolescence, 225 
Morley, Christopher, 29 
Moskowitz, Mrs. Henry, 241 
Mother in home, 24-30 
Movie, effect on home of, 234, 

237, 238 


N 


National Committee for Men- 
tal Hygiene, 137 

Newer meanings of discipline, 
195-212 

New York Herald, 226 

“Normal Mind, The,” 52 


283 


Nursery school, 16, 17, 29, 48, 
49-70, 109, 112, 117, 270 


O 


Opportunities, 
252 


vacation, 24I- 


P 


Parental education, 265-272 
Parents and new psychology, 


97 
Parents’ outlook on life, 255- 
256 
Pawlaw’s dog, 204 
Pennsylvania, University of, 


31 
Play-time, youth and, 217-230 
“Power, will to,” 13, 19 
“Problems in Dynamic Psy- 
chology,” 104 
Progressive Education Asso- 
ciation, 165 
Psychasthenia, 35 
Psychiatrists, 27, 32, 97, 154, 
221 
Psychologist, 76, 217 
Psychology, 75, 77, 153, 187, 
194; flapper, 125 


R 


Radio, ‘effect on home of, 234, 
237, 239 

Recall-memory, 193 

Recognition-memory, 193 

Recreation, leisure and, 215- 
216 

Religion, 259-264 

Religious education, 257 

Rivers, 32 | 

Root; ,Wiss LL). k70 

Russell, Dr. James E., 4 


284 
S 


Seashore, Merrill 
adolescence, 225 
“Self-expression,” 26 

School, 87-89 
School, Merrill-Palmer, 49, 50 
School, nursery, 16, 17, 20, 48, 
49-70, I00, II2, I17, 270 
ee vacation, 243, 245, 


24 

Simkhovitch, Mary Kings- 
bury, 48 

Smith College, 24, 28 

Spencer, Anna Garlin, 265 

Settee Achievement Test, 
I 

“Subjective Judgments,” 169 

Symphony, Haydn’s Farewell, 
231 


and, on 


Ay 


Taboos, 210-212, 223 

Tagore, quoted, 263 

Teachers and changing educa- 
tion, 163-164 

Temper tantrums, 58, 59, 100, 
105, 110, 123 

Test, Stamford achievement, 
168; Terman Revision of 
Binet, 167, 168 

Tests, intelligence, 166 

‘Phomas,Drg°219 

Thom, Dr. D. A., 99 


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INDEX 


“Thunder on the Left,” 29 
U 


University, Boston, 83; Cath- 
OG) sear see. Chicago. 345 
Clark, 217, 220; Columbia, 
WhO TOG; a1 Oo ne Sze 
Pennsylvania, 31 

Upanishads, quoted, 39 


V 


Vacation camp, 246, 247, 248 

Vacation schools,. 243, 245, 
246 . 

Vacation opportunities, 
252 


Van Waters, Miriam, 217 
W 


Wesley, John, quoted, 196 

Westermarck, 32 

Williams, Frankwood 
M.D., 137, 223 

“Will to power,” 13, 19 

Women in Europe, 40, 42 

Woolley, Helen T., Ph.D., 49 


>'s 
Youth, from childhood to, 


118-136 
Youth and play-time, 217-230 


24I- 


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